[IAEP] sugar framework

[Carol Farlow Lerche]

I think that's an excellent proposal, and it is probably something that was
in the mind of the "develop" activity developer.  But I think (as Bryan
mentioned in his conversation) that it isn't necessary to hypothesize doing
this activity building on the XO itself.  Many developers work on more
powerful systems than their target platform, just because development IDEs
and other development tools are often heavyweights.  This doesn't mean that
the developer can't be working within Sugar, now that Sugar is almost
production-ready as a part of Linux distributions for other hardware.

With that prolog, there are various open source IDE and app building
platforms that could be the basis for this, including Glade and Eclipse.   I
do think that Wayne's suggestion of making it easier to have activities that
use a local web server as part of the architecture (rather than an ad hoc
component that individual activities each have to hack in) is excellent and
would open a lot of new activity opportunities.

An idea of mine that I would like to work on to expand the scope of literacy
activities is to build an underlying English word/image bank resource based
in part on
"The Sounds of English" <http://call.canil.ca/english/index.html>, a website
that offers rich tools to construct word lists for phonics-based teaching,
which is one big component of English literacy.  The idea would be to make
such activities as memory and the gcompris word games draw their words from
this underlying resource, so that a child could progress through the stages
of reading and spelling the words in these categories in a sensible, teacher
driven manner.  I don't know how much the phonics emphasis translates to
other languages, but I am sure it is applicable in part, and even more sure
that the idea of an underlying word/image bank is even more universal.  Also
many of the deployments seem to want to teach English as a second language.

"Free-Reading.net" is a website offering many resources for teaching early
readers It has a complete open-source curriculum "Intervention A" that has
even been formally accepted as a choice for use in  Florida public schools.
I think a lot of their teacher-driven activities could translate to Sugar
activities.  It might be interesting to try to systematically implement
these as a way to be more relevent to the youngest learners.




On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 12:15 PM, David Van Assche <dvanassche at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi,
>   So today a couple of us education enthusiasts were contemplating
> the recent discussions concerning an easier activity creation method,
> which might involve ajax or Flash. The problem with Flash, apart from
> its proprietary nature, is the fact that it doesn't really do
> collaboration, one of the corner stones of sugar. It came to my mind
> that to make things easier for content creators, a structured method
> for creating activities is what is really needed. Something like a
> framework, as is available for many languages (think django or python)
> but with a very specific aim, building educational apps that include
> collaboration. I can foresee something like that making many more
> educators interested in coding educational apps. The framework
> wouldn't have to be very complicated at all, it could just be a higher
> set of commands (something like etoys, but simpler) that are
> specifically focused to making the sugar activity ui, help with
> collaboration, and then have a specific set of available instructions.
> I've never been involved in the creation of a framework, so maybe what
> I'm saying isn't realistic, but its an idea....
>
> kind Regards,
> David Van Assche
> www.nubae.com
> _______________________________________________
> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
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>



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"Don't think for a minute that power concedes. We have to work like our
future depends on it."  -- Barack Obama
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