KDE Education Survey

Filed under: AmarokBlog,KDE,Kubuntu,Parley,PlanetKDE,PlanetKubuntu,linux — Lydia at 8:16 pm on Saturday, November 21, 2009

We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free. – Epictetus

The KDE-Edu team is looking for feedback from their users to improve their applications and to find out where to invest the limited time they have. If you are a student, teacher or just casual user of any of these applications we are looking for your feedback:

  • Kanagram
  • KHangMan
  • Kiten
  • KLettres
  • KWordQuiz
  • Parley
  • KAlgebra
  • KBruch
  • Kig
  • KmPlot
  • Blinken
  • KGeography
  • KTouch
  • KTurtle
  • Kalzium
  • KStars
  • Marble
  • Step
  • Cantor
  • Rocs

We created a short survey (1 page – about 5 minutes) where you can tell us about the 3 problems you have with any of the applications listed above as well as give some general feedback. Those 3 problems can be small or big. We want to know about them. This feedback is incredibly valuable to the team so if you know anyone who should take this survey but doesn’t read this blog please send them a link.

Make KDE-Edu rock even more!

PS: If you want to help with any of the programs listed above (by writing code, creating example content, documentation, promotion or anything else) please get in touch with me.

10 Comments

Comment by TheBlackCat

November 21, 2009 @ 8:43 pm

Might I suggest you divide user groups up a bit more finely? With applications like cantor being integrated there is a great potential for use in higher education and advanced research. I would suggest:

Grade school/primary school student
Grade school/primary school teacher
Undegraduate/secondary school student
Graduate/postsecondary school student
University/college professor
Researcher
Other:

I think it would provide some useful insight into how the applications can be improved for use by more advanced users.

Comment by tuxman

November 22, 2009 @ 12:52 am

There is an immensely useful application called KtechLab that i think should be herre, it seem it is not going to be ported to KDE4 i do hope this is not the case as this is a wonderful application.

Comment by Lydia

November 22, 2009 @ 1:00 am

@TheBlackCat: Yea that would be interesting indeed. But I wanted to keep the survey as simple as possible while still being very useful for the team.

@tuxman: I believe this is a problem of manpower :/ If you or someone else wants to help get some people interested in this again contact me by email and we will investigate.

Comment by andreas

November 22, 2009 @ 3:25 am

Hello

Thanks for the blog entry. I would like to help, but I’m no coder.
So I start testing some apps and saw that
1. The documentation isn’t realy good.
2. The apps are all very different in there target audience
3. KDE has a forum but when you look at the forum there are less entries and the most people are interested in the Brainstorm area. Maybe it is possible to make a subfolder for education entry.

Thanks for the blog entry

Comment by Lydia

November 22, 2009 @ 2:52 pm

@Andreas: Yea we could use some help with all the points you mention. If you are interested in helping out with that please let me know.

Comment by TheBlackCat

November 22, 2009 @ 5:33 pm

@ Andreas: the forum already has a “Games, Education & Utilities” sub-forum.

Comment by andreas

November 22, 2009 @ 6:13 pm

@ TheBlackCat: I’ll know. And I also see, that most action will be at the mailing list.

I install a linux computer for my parents and I also install gcompris vor my grandchild. My grandshild will love gcompris because she can click and have a great overview about a lot of education apps. She all the time talk to my that I’ll install gcompris at her (her parents) windows pc. That’s a problem. The second problem is the translation of the help in every game.

whatever. I’ll tested the edu suit from kde last night and today. There is a realy great potential. The most apps are realy usefule and good. (I’l make some vocabulary tests in parley)

I only use the apps one day, so I can’t say what you can make better. I only like to help.

Where is a good place to talk about some ideas? here, the forum or the mailing list?

Comment by Lydia

November 22, 2009 @ 6:28 pm

@Andreas Great! The best way to get started at the moment is the kde-edu mailing list. This is where most of the contributors will read it.

Pingback by Frederik Gladhorn (fregl) » KDE Education Survey

November 23, 2009 @ 2:52 pm

[...] There are lots of good applications under the KDE Education umbrella and very nice people behind them, caring for the applications and their users. Sometimes it’s very hard to guesstimate what our users like and dislike. Yes, we crave your feedback! As a result of the meeting, we sat down and created a survey, to gather some feedback. It’s our first go at something like this, so there’s still lots to learn … Learning and Free Software are just a good combination! It won’t take long to fill out, so go ahead and donate us a few minutes of your precious time. Lydia wrote about the survey, but we’d like more people to participate still. [...]

Comment by Iñaki

November 29, 2009 @ 4:13 am

Unfortunately I know nothing about programming, and the only free educative program I use is Solfege, which is a Gnome app. As a music teacher I’d want to suggest to any who may read this and feels like contributing to KDE educative software to consider starting a musical education software project.

Cheers

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