[OLPC-GSoC] Educational Toolkit

[Edward Cherlin]

On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 9:06 PM, Deepank Gupta <deepankgupta at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am a student at NSIT currently in my third year of undergraduate studies
> and have been associated with OLPC for the past one and a half months as a
> volunteer developer. I just want to say hello to the GSoC community and
> introduce a new project about an educational toolkit inspired from the needs
> of students all around. It all started with a small idea of providing
> automated tests,

If you can generate tests automatically, you should be able to create
drill-and-practice tools such as flash cards, which I see you mention
below. I wonder whether we can get some computational linguists to
provide a way to generate grammar practice. I don't mean declensions
and conjugations, but generative and transformational grammar
questions and answers or statements and responses.

"He likes coffee," as a cue could have a variety of responses using
different grammatical transformations of varying complexity.

"He doesn't like coffee."

"Do you like coffee?"

"I used to like coffee."

"I didn't know that he likes coffee."

"Do you know whether he likes coffee?"

"Someone who likes coffee might also like coffee ice cream."

Different languages put emphasis on different transformations. Gender
is required in some languages, and entirely optional in others, while
yet other languages make quite different distinctions. Languages have
different numbers of plurals. There are a multitude of different
structures in different languages that we would want to support.

> but has started to grow into a multi-dimensional project
> with comments and ideas from numerous people including recommendation from
> Walter himself. Let me introduce with the basic idea :
>
> The educational toolkit is a software to facilitate discussion in classroom
> with the help of technology. It aims at providing teachers and students with
> a tool to pose problems, compare and discuss solutions by revolving the
> discussion around it in something known as Demo Mode. It can provide flash
> cards and other objective and subjective tests that can be used as a formal
> testing tool for class tests and quizzes to provide a better gauge of a
> student's progress to the teacher.

Does this have any relation to Hypercard-style creation of learning tools?

> The software will be developed in Python with emphasis on easy User
> Interface and will aim to act like a tool which does not take over the job
> of teaching, but promotes natural class-room environment and will aim to fit
> in the classroom environment. The choice of Python as a programming language
> gives us the power of Object Oriented Design and Implementation along with
> lots of libraries and easy integration with Sugar and support for Shared
> Activities. You can find more details on the project at the Wiki page along
> with the links to technologies in use at
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Educational_toolkit  and also find the current
> code-base at http://www.nsitonline.in/it/students/2005/deepank/projects.html
>
> Although, the software is still in the planning stages with lots of feedback
> and ideas coming in, but, coding has started side-by-side going with the
> motto of "Release Early, Release Often". The current code-base is just a
> very minimum demo, but the work is going on at rapid pace and it will
> increase exponentially over the next few weeks with progress being updated
> every week.
>
> Thanks and Regards
> Deepank Gupta
>
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-- 
Edward Cherlin
End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay