Educational toolkit -2

About Me

Q1: What is your name?

Ans : Prateek Nigam

Q2 :What is your email address?

Ans :prat[dot]nigam[at]gmail[dot]com

Q3 :What is your Sugar Labs wiki username?

Ans : iago

Q4 : What is your IRC nickname?

Ans : iago666

Q5 : What is your primary language? (We have mentors who speak multiple languages and can match you with one of them if you'd prefer.)

Ans : English and Hindi

Q6 :Where are you located, and what hours do you tend to work? (We also try to match mentors by general time zone if possible.)

Ans: New Delhi, UTC+530 Susceptible to any timing.

Q7 : Have you participated in an open-source project before? If so, please send us URLs to your profile pages for those projects, or some other demonstration of the work that you have done in open-source. If not, why do you want to work on an open-source project this summer?

Ans : This would be my first tryst with the Open source. Aspiration comes with ability; since a last few months I have been learning python and have been working on small utility scripts for myself, for college projects. Have worked on college fests as well, And now I think with proper channelized efforts, I might actually pull off an open source project. Open source is democracy in software, and it certainly would be a privilege to contribute back to the open source community.

i) Have developed a chat client/server script in python for a LAN using Asyncore module.
ii) Have developed a server in python to interact with a backend and flash clients using xml messages for an online quiz.
iii) Have experience in conceptualizing systems and identifying the data flow, use case scenarios and constructing equivalent UML model.

iv) Have maintained the site for the online journal (idce.in) which I was co-founder of. Used Joomla for updations and content management.

About your project

Q.1 :What is the name of your project?

Ans : Educational Toolkit

Q.2 : Describe your project in 10-20 sentences. What are you making? Who are you making it for, and why do they need it? What technologies (programming languages, etc.) will you be using?

a) : What are you making?

Educational toolkit aims at promoting the classroom scenario of the student - teacher interaction, and the student - student collaboration by means of technology, Unlike other technologies which have tried to eliminate the teacher from the scene, Educational toolkit would rather facilitate their interaction thus preserving the good old human angle to the classroom, yet employing the cutting edge technology.

Ways a teacher uses it:

Prepare lessons, share them with students.
Prepare tests, evaluate them, performance analysis.
Keeping in touch with students,

Ways students can use it:

The conventional white-board made available right on their screen.
Take interactive tests
Communicate with the teacher, and peer group.
Participate in groups to accomplish some task.

The system would also maintain the student records for later reference.

Modes of Operation

ClassRoom Mode

Teacher uses the web and the central server to do some research and prepares a lesson.
Lesson may involve Flash cards, text, images, diagrams etc.
Lesson is converted to lesson.xml and is sent over the network.
Children receive the xml, parse and view the lessons.
Children may choose to save the lesson for later reference.

Test Mode

Setting the test

Teacher uses the web, and the central database to set the paper.
Test may include text based questions or image based. Questions can be objective type or may require the students to input a value or the word.
Teacher creates a model answer file as well.
The test is converted into test.xml and is sent over the network
Student machines receive the file, parse it and then is shown to the student.

Taking the Test

Students answer the questions.
An answer file is generated with appropriate name (student#.xml)
The answer file is sent to the teacher (who has his/her device switched on during the test)

Evaluation

The answer files are parsed.
The answer files are compared with the model answer file (saved by teacher)
Objective questions are checked straightaway.
To check word answers, Regular expressions are used (Spelling errors are integral part of student life!)
Scores are given and stored in database.
Teacher has all the answers on the system and may choose to discuss them in classroom.

Group Activity

Teacher may set a group activity from time to time such as solving a crossword puzzle or a subjective hypothetical scenario etc.
Students form groups by invitations. Teacher may intervene as well.
Changes by one are reflected by multicasting them to the group.
Groups submit their answer sheets.

Fun Learning

Students can play word building games.
Random alphabet appear on each screen.
Children make words.
They are checked over a dictionary and scores are given.
A leaderboard is maintained.
Many such games can be conceptulized.

b) : Who are you making it for?

With interactive graphics, the primary students (age 6-10) are the prime targets. Students above this age group can also employ the system in their classroom. Teachers also benefit from the system

c): Why do they need it ??

As stated already, the system promotes the student-teacher interaction and the student-student collaboration in a natural and instinctive way yet reduces the workload.
The effort and time a teacher would spend in preparation of flash cards or overhead projection sheets would be heavily reduced.
Similarly children are saved from the toll of copy the lessons in their notebooks, it would happen all by itself.
Interactive games can be played by students amongst themselves.

d) : What technologies (programming languages, etc.) will you be using?

The system will use python scripts to send data as xml over the channel. XML will be parsed by the DOM API made available to it. PyGTK is the best choice for the UI. DBUS and telepathy for IPC. A database (Mysql preferably) will be used on the server and will be dealt with using some API in python (MySQLdb for Mysql)

Q.3 : What is the timeline for development of your project? The Summer of Code work period is 7 weeks long, May 23 - August 10; tell us what you will be working on each week. (As the summer goes on, you and your mentor will adjust your schedule, but it's good to have a plan at the beginning so you have an idea of where you're headed.) Note that you should probably plan to have something "working and 90% done" by the midterm evaluation (July 6-13); the last steps always take longer than you think, and we will consider cancelling projects which are not mostly working by then.

Ans : To be Discussed.

Q.4 : Convince us, in 5-15 sentences, that you will be able to successfully complete your project in the timeline you have described. This is usually where people describe their past experiences, credentials, prior projects, schoolwork, and that sort of thing, but be creative. Link to prior work or other resources as relevant.

Ans : The major chunk of the project requires the developer to come up with the elementary design of the system.

I have taken three courses in my school dealing with system design and engineering and believe that I am capable of arriving at a decent design.

I recently designed a system and developed a script in python for a quizzing even at the college fest with a similar structure. It was python server mediating between flash client and a database with xml messages being sent over the network.

Talking of communication, I have developed a script for chatting on a LAN using Asyncore module in python, so not a lot of time would go into refurbishment of the basics.

You and the community

Q.1 : If your project is successfully completed, what will its impact be on the Sugar Labs community? Give 3 answers, each 1-3 paragraphs in length. The first one should be yours. The other two should be answers from members of the Sugar Labs community, at least one of whom should be a Sugar Labs GSoC mentor. Provide email contact information for non-GSoC mentors.

Ans : In context to my native place, New Delhi, India, children have grown accustomed to the heavy school bags, stuffed with huge notebooks. A place where pen-paper thinking prevails even today, advent of such a technology can not only make learning more fun but relieve kids off their pressure. Teachers would then spend more time innovating rather than being absorbed in preparing material for their class or evaluating the answer books for that matter. For kids with special needs, this technology would fill the gap between grasping the fundamental and performing in the tests. It promotes interaction along with group effort. Needless to say that this educational technology can actually attract a lot more enrollments, once learning becomes fun!

TODO: Get anecdotals

Q.2 : Sugar Labs will be working to set up a small (5-30 unit) Sugar pilot near each student project that is accepted to GSoC so that you can immediately see how your work affects children in a deployment. We will make arrangements to either supply or find all the equipment needed. Do you have any ideas on where you would like your deployment to be, who you would like to be involved, and how we can help you and the community in your area begin it?

Ans : My mother is a teacher in the school I passed out from. I believe, that would be the place where I would like to test the project. The various faculty members and the Principal can be contacted and be asked for a trial run in one of the classrooms or computer Lab once necessary environment has been ported into the machines.

Q.3 : What will you do if you get stuck on your project and your mentor isn't around?

Ans:Glad we have been bestowed with the marvels of the Internet. This is what I would resort to.

Googling, IRC, mailing list.

Q.4 : How do you propose you will be keeping the community informed of your progress and any problems or questions you might have over the course of the project?

Ans : I will do the following things :

Write about it on my blog : http://nigam89.wordpress.com(2 posts/week, or achievement centric post whichever is more frequent)
Update WIKI Page with Progress
Through IRC and Mailing Lists.

Miscellaneous An example of the kind of screenshot of your first modification to your development environment which you should include in your application. Note that the drop-down menu text has Mel's email address in place of the word "Restart" - your screenshot should contain your email instead.

1. We want to make sure that you can set up a development environment before the summer starts. Please send us a link to a screenshot of your Sugar development environment with the following modification: when you hover over the XO-person icon in the middle of Home view, the drop-down text should have your email in place of "Restart." See the image on the right for an example. It's normal to need assistance with this, so please visit our IRC channel, #sugar on irc.freenode.net, and ask for help.

2. What is your t-shirt size? (Yes, we know Google asks for this already; humor us.)

Extra Large

3. Describe a great learning experience you had as a child.

We, here in India are taught the alphabet when we are 4 or so. I was having trouble making the letter 'f' in running hand, all the loops and the curves were abstruse for my tiny little brain. It was then when my mother associated the whole hand motion involved in making the letter 'f' with a story, how a thief escaped from the prison and how the police caught the thief. I still don't make perfect 'f', but I look back at it and wonder...had it not been for that the thief, the quick brown "ox" and not the "fox" would have been jumping over the lazy dog!

4. Is there anything else we should have asked you or anything else that we should know that might make us like you or your project more?

Apart from decent technical skills, I think what your organisation is looking for is people who are passionate. I wanted to be a teacher at one point of my life, but I guess my love for computers got me here. I believe that people who are passionate about education, passionate about giving back to the society in one way or the other would be most suited for the tasks associated with your organisation and that I am!

And as far as this project is concerned, making education more interactive, more fun is the need of the hour, especially in a country like mine where drop out rate at a primary level is really high. Such a toolkit would revolutionize the way we impart education.