[IAEP] Computer as a tool

[K. K. Subramaniam]

On Tuesday 14 Jul 2009 12:03:35 am David Farning wrote:
> Have you considered using Sugar or Sugar on a stick for your program?
The project was conceived before SoaS. We faced severe constraints with power 
budgets and tech support.  Wifi and ethernet couldn't compete with sneakernet 
;-). It was a back to basics project. Any use of computer had better be worth 
all that extra pain; else the initial enthusiasm will fizzle out. This ruled 
out many games, audio/video/picture work.

> What have been the issues preventing you from using Sugar? What
> blockers still exist which would prevent you from using Sugar?
LaTeX and Stellarium were two big show stoppers. We just wanted a 'digital  
kit' that children could use to read/write in their local languages 
(Kannada/Hindi/English). A lot of work in Sugar was focussed around UI and 
storage models but not in multilingual support and immersive learning.

We picked LaTeX because it allowed teachers and children to generate high 
quality text for vernacular and Math text. Children as young as 10 taught 
themselves LaTeX encoding just to be able to get high quality labels for their 
diagrams.

Local culture has deep ties into astronomy and lunar calendar. Stellarium 
offered an excellent way to connect classrooms to the skies. Students could 
directly observe planets and track their orbits. Events like the upcoming 
eclipse on July 22nd would have been missed in the past because of monsoon 
clouds. Not any more.

Subbu