Debian for kids
Hi, all. I'm the leader of SEUL/edu. We've just become aware of the
discussion about Debian for kids through a heads-up message from one of
our subscribers, and I wanted to throw a few ideas out for
consideration. I hope I'm not intruding on your discussions since I'm
not a member of debian-devel.
Anyway, there's quite a bit going on in the scholastic side of Linux in
education, and a bit less but still a fair amount in the home side of
kid's Linux apps. You know about us <http://www.seul.org/edu> and Chris
Ellec's Linux for Kids <http://www.linuxforkids.com>. There's also a
mailing list called kidsgames <http://www.smluc.org/SIA/kidsgames/>. If
you look through the kidsgames archives you'll find work and discussion
about a number of programs, including a sticker book, an
allowance/banking program (the Bank of Daddy), and the beginnings of The
Penguin Machine (inspired by The Incredible Machine from Sierra). These
programs are probably listed on Linux for Kids too. Chris is pretty
good about keeping that up to date. I know all of these folks would
welcome your thoughts and assistance in polishing their programs and in
creating others.
There's a good bit of cross-fertilization that goes on between these
groups, too. Chris Ellec and I are on both the seul-edu and kidsgames
mailing lists, as are a number of others. You're all invited to join in
our discussions as much as you'd like. Just go to the websites and sign
up.
About documentation. This is of course a major problem, for both
school-oriented home-oriented programs. We have a task group on
SEUL/edu working on an implementation of the DocBook SGML DTD
specifically for educational documentation. We hope to have it in a
releasable form shortly. Our first priority is for documentation to
help educators install, configure, and maintain Linux and associated
applications in scholastic environments, but we're trying to write this
spec generally enough to be useful for all sorts of end-user
documentation. You can see the discussion and work on this at the
documentation task group mailing list archive
<http://www.seul.org/archives/seul/edu/docutg/>.
About a kid's UI. We've talked about this on and off, too. My personal
preference is a locked-down Windowmaker. The icons on the dock are big
enough to be easily selectable, and as the kids get older it's easy to
gradually enable more features till they're running a standard
Windowmaker. We've talked a bit about things like kid's word processors
versus a restricted version of a standard word processor. I tend to the
side of limited versions of standard programs that can be gradually
unrestricted as the kid's abilities increase.
Anyway, I hope that you'll follow any interests you may have in these
topics and contribute to making Linux not just acceptable but desirable
for kids!
--
Doug Loss Even if you're on the right track,
Data Network Coordinator you'll get run over if you just
Bloomsburg University sit there.
dloss@bloomu.edu Will Rogers
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