Newsletter 8

04 April 2002

This is the newsletter number 8 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

What's new?

KDE3.0 was out yesterday, Wednesday 3rd April.
See
http://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-3.0.html for more information.

The kdeedu module is integrated for the first time.

Update

Kalzium (periodic elements table) has been improved. New version: 0.4
http://edu.kde.org/kalzium/

Reflexions about internationalization

Why is the KDE3.0 release important for us? Because it contains an Edutainment package! This is really essential to the KDE-Edu project as KDE is translated to more than 50 languages and thus the Edu package is translated. Standalone KDE programs that are not part of the official release are more difficult to get translated. So the applications that are released in the kdeedu package for KDE3 have the interface and the doc translated in your language.

What does that mean exactly?
If you are for example German, you download the KDE3 packages you want (some are compulsory like arts, kdelibs, kdesupport and kdebase) and the kde-i18n-de package.
You install them all and in the KControlCenter you choose german as your desktop language. After that, all the KDE programs you run have the interface and doc in german!

But for educational software, we have to go further with internationalization. Let's take an example: KLettres. KLettres allows a very young child to learn the French alphabet and some simple syllables. If you run your KDE desktop in the German language, KLettres will still allow you to learn the French alphabet and syllables. You'll get menus and help in German. We cannot just translate the alphabet and syllables from French to German as the letters are not the same and the process for learning the syllables is not the same either.

If we want KLettres to teach other languages than French, we have to get from teachers the syllables that are the easiest to learn in this new language. This is what we would like to do and it's quite difficult because we need people that work with us for different languages. I hope we'll get a network of dedicated teachers in several countries to achieve this.

Projects

Developers now prepare the new programs that will be out with KDE3.1 in a few months time. I'll tell you more next month about those new projects.

The KDE-Edu team
kde-edu@edu.kde.org