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Criteria for educational software



Am Sonntag 07 September 2008 schrieb Andreas Tille:
> I have no idea about the criteria which make a package fit for
> education but some review might be interesting (for instance there is
> a Debian packaged version of Avogadro which a hint was given to in
> this thread listed on Debian Science).

Dear Andreas,

you are hitting a good point here. Let's try to collect some criteria 
and place them on a prominent web space...

Practically aspects: 
Software that is already being used by teachers in educational context 
might be called fit for school.

Usability:
In most cases (apart from computer science), software fit for school 
will need an intuitive GUI (Qt, GTK), multilingual documentation, 
abilitiy to save and continue your work.

Needed Knowledge:
Some scientific software is only usable for scientists with a knowledge 
beyond what is taught in secondary schools. 

Use Cases:
In educational context, I'd distinct different kinds of use cases. 
Software fit for school should match at lease one of them. This list 
coming into my mind is probably not complete:

A. Productive software - result orientated
Software to write a text, draw a sketch, create a mindmap

B. Software supporting self managed learning
Software that enables students to find out relations etc. themselves. 
These could be simulations (KStep) or interactive quizes (KGepgraphy).

C. Software connected to a specific subject being part of a curriculum
e.g. object orientated modelling/UML (umbrello); Kalzium (chemistry)

D. Meta learning
...

to be ctd.


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