<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; ">Dear Anne-Marie,<DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>I am a teacher (of mathematics) to future elementary teachers, and have been investigating the possibilities for open-source software in my classes, and my students' future classes.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>My conclusion so far: </DIV><DIV>Edubuntu seems to be a collection of miscellaneous pieces that happened to be available. Very little of it seems to have been developed in a unified way, with educational research and objectives at the forefront.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>GCompris, for example, has lots of cute, "dancing frog" animations that sometimes embody important and interesting concepts. Other times it's just drill on computation facts. (Drill is boring and is low-level thinking. However, drill is perhaps better done by computers than live teachers.)</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>What I use for my future teachers: (These are all useful for the middle grades (ages about 9-14))</DIV><DIV>*<SPAN class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </SPAN>a spreadsheet program (OpenOffice or Excel), for teaching ideas of algebra. (This is a long story of what concepts come out, and what activities to do to bring them out. Very few math educators seem to be using these tools.)</DIV><DIV>*<SPAN class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </SPAN>dynamic geometry for both synthetic (no coordinates) and analytic (coordinates and equations) geometry. I use GeoGebra (java, free open source) or Geometer's Sketchpad or Cabri.</DIV><DIV>*<SPAN class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </SPAN>Logo (for some special purpose lessons). I use a small implementation that runs over the web (TurtleTracks.)</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>For high school, it would be useful to have a computer algebra system that is moderately powerful and easy to use, with both a graphical and a text-based interface. I have not found anything open source that meets these criteria. Commercial software that meets at least some of them: Graphing Calculator (better for graphing than for symbolic algebra), actual graphing calculators (Texas Instruments TI 83 and 89, for instance; I find these awkward to use, and hard or expensive to interface with computers), Derive (the computing engine behind the TIs; I don't use this because it only runs on Windows). Maple and Mathematica are much too complex to use for most students, and are very expensive. </DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>There is also a shortage of unified, educationally sound mathematics curriculum in many of these areas. In the US, at least, dynamic geometry and graphing calculators are used and integrated in some math classrooms, mostly at the secondary level. (We do not have a national curriculum. Our curriculum is locally controlled, sometimes even varying from teacher to teacher.) My impression of the elementary/primary level is that it's mostly arithmetic drill programs, if anything.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>While I am eternally grateful to those who do the coding, it may be time to coordinate with some education people.</DIV><DIV><BR><DIV><DIV>On Sep 30, 2006, at 7:58 AM, Anne-Marie Mahfouf wrote:</DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Hi,</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">I am Anne-Marie, the KDE-Edu module coordinator (and founder). I am glad<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Edubuntu uses our programs and I would like to work more closely with you all<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">in order to get feedback from teachers, schools and parents to<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">1) improve our current applications</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">2) develop new programs according to your wishes.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">A polemic is starting regarding Kalzium as it seems the Edubuntu team is<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">developing a Kalzium-like for Gnome (Gallium). I find this a bit strange and<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">I would like to ask you your intentions for the future. Are you going to<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">duplicate our work (you perfectly have the right to do so) or are we going to<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">work together in order to offer more educational programs to teachers?</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">The kdelibs and qt on which the KDE-Edu programs depend are not big<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">dependencies. GCompris for example is also quite big (if I quote his author,<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">he said to me GCompris is bigger than Gnome itself). It's already difficult<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">to have developers doing educational work as most are young and have no<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">children and prefer working on multimedia for example. Duplicating the<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">current work would be a waste of time.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">I hope you can clarify all that so we (KDE-Edu and Edubuntu) can begin a<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">partnership if you are interested.<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Thanks for your attention,</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Anne-Marie</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">--<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">edubuntu-devel mailing list</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><A href="mailto:edubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com">edubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com</A></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><A href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/edubuntu-devel">https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/edubuntu-devel</A></DIV> </BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><BR><DIV> <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Susan Addington</FONT></P><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Math Department, California State University, San Bernardino (USA)</FONT></P><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"></SPAN> </DIV><BR></DIV></BODY></HTML>