[OLPC library] Math curriculum for the XO

[Edward Cherlin]

On Jan 30, 2008 6:56 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb at cesmail.net> wrote:

> Well ... I'll join this party. :) I haven't looked at what's already
> ported to the XO recently,

See the xo-get Wiki page, which points to the repositories at
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities#Math_.26_Science, and
http://gcompris.net/incoming/xo/

> but there is a fair amount of existing open
> source math education software already at the elementary school (USA)
> and middle-school (USA) levels.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Linux_education_packages

> I'd check out FreeDuc
>
> http://www.ofset.org/freeduc-cd
> http://www.ofset.org/articles/29
>
> I believe the major European languages are already covered, although the
> main project language on the mailing lists is French. Migrating this
> software from Debian to Fedora ought to be pretty easy. I don't know
> about Sugar interfaces, however.

Albert Cahalan has a nearly automatic method for Sugarizing non-Python
apps. See the Sugarizing page.

> I played with the calculator briefly. It's actually not all that bad,
> but XCalc is better and of course open source. A spreadsheet -- well --
> I use them, but aside from their ubiquity, I don't really like them for
> teaching math.

Yes, that's finance, not math. ^_^

> I've loaded the more popular open source ones on my Linux
> systems but I do nearly everything in R. Now if we're going to be
> teaching accounting, then I'd say you need one. :)
>
> As far as new software is concerned, I'd recommend developing it in
> EToys/Squeak rather than Python. A "baby CAS" ought to be a lot easier
> in Smalltalk, being a descendant of Lisp, rather than Python, which is
> essentially an imperative scripting language.

There are several lighter-weight (2-3 MB) GUI frontends to the
heavy-duty CAS packages. I haven't checked, but I would think that
they could be used to connect to an instance running on a server. Even
if they can't, it should be much easier to modify them than to start
over.

> But as far as I'm concerned, the industrial strength open source math
> software -- Axiom, Sage, R, Octave, Maxima, theorem provers, etc. --
> should *all* be available on the school servers!

Definitely. Also other, more specialized software, such as kali for
group theory.

> Unless the servers are
> so limited in RAM, processing power and disk space that they can't be
> used for this sort of thing,

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/School_Server_Specification#Processor_.26_Memory

Small server
AMD Geode LX 466 MHz
256 MB RAM
40-60 GB disk

Large server
1GHz x86 processor
1 GB RAM or more
320-400 GB disk

So we're talking about the large server here.

> there's no reason I can think of why that
> power shouldn't be available to the teachers and more advanced students.

Hear, hear! Although we will have to try the experiment in order to
find out at what age children can begin to make good use of such
systems.
-- 
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