The KDE Education Project
Newsletter 6
01 February 2002
This is the newsletter number 6 from the KDE-Edu project. The project's ultimate aim is to create educational software based around KDE, the K Desktop Environment and all our projects are under an Open Source licence (mainly GPL or Artistic Licence). This newsletter keeps you informed of the state of this project.
Website
http://edu.kde.org
The website is being reorganized and is currently tested.
What's new?
KDE-Edu is part of Schoolforge
http://www.schoolforge.net
Schoolforge was launched on 8th January 2002.
Schoolforge's mission is to unify independent organizations that advocate,
use, and develop open resources for primary and secondary education.
Schoolforge intends to make open educational resources more effective, efficient, and
ubiquitous by enhancing communication, sharing resources, and increasing the
transparency of development. Schoolforge members advocate the use of open
source and free software, open texts and lessons, and open curricula for the
advancement of education.
It is important to note that KDE-Edu is the only project that develop eduware
for the moment.
New projects annonced
- The developers worked a lot as a team on Kalzium. Kalzium visualizes the
Chemical Table of Elements, give information about each element, features a
quiz, a timeline and a link to a webpage for more information about each
element.
See http://edu.kde.org/kalzium - KVerbos is an application specially designed to study Spanish verb forms.
The program suggests a verb and a tense and the user enters the different
forms.
The program corrects the user input and gives a feedback.
http://edu.kde.org/kverbos/
About sound
For the KDE3.1 release (in several months), it has been decided to use the Ogg Vorbis format for sound files. For the moment, we use wav and MP3 files. Wav files are really too big and MP3 is not totally free. Ogg Vorbis is free and the files are nicely compressed. It was not chosen earlier because the ogg libs just reach a very stable state (the project is quite new).
We are also in touch with the KDE-Games team to see if we could develop a common sound and pics database and how to implement it.
All this takes time but you can see that a lot of ideas are being shared.
KDE3.0 will be released in March (a new beta will be out soon) and for the first time, the kdeedu package will be included. You will then be able to install easily the educational applications with KDE3.0
.The KDE-Edu team
kde-edu@edu.kde.org
