Hi Horst,
Horst Salzwedel a écrit :
Hi Eric + all,
congratulations for the great idea of doing an OOo version for education. Like MS Office, OOo has functionality aimed for offices and
does not consider the requirements for education and learning.
That's the generic feedback indeed.
Learning is forming models in our heads and playing and manipulating them.
Numbers themselves are just facts.
Agreed.
However, spreadsheets like Calc are hiding models and are just displaying numbers. Therefore they do not further learning. Additionally
they are nearly impossible to debug for complex problems.
I know there is a scenario feature, but I don't know how to use it.
With the complexity of our technology are increasing by a factor 100 every 10 years with the increase of chip capabilities. Understanding the systems around us or developing new ones can only be done based on
computer models. It is critical for our society and for our technological progress that this is taking place already in schools,
colleges and universities.
After being correctly defined it's role :)
With OOo freely available everywhere, it is an excellent platform to provide
for this functionality for supporting learning and research.
As a step towards this goal Tino Jungebloud wrote a Diploma thesis, in which he intergrated the open source tool Octave (similar to Matlab) in
OOo. This integration makes it possible to use Octave in OOo for like Calc or other applications + combine functionaliy of Calc and Octave.
Octave includes Linear Algebra libraries, integrators for simulation + a huge libraries of numerical mathematics. You may use this for
mathematical experiments like changing parameters with a slider in Calc and observing how the outcome of a simulation in Octave and its
graphical output is changing.
Wow, that's awesome !
To talk more about me, I'm myself a Maxima ( i.e. free version of a
Maple-like, for formal computations) user since years, and I had the
secret wish, to do the same Tim did with Octave, but with Maxima :)
So see it done for Octave, is really a great news !!
As an example this may be used for teaching in introductory math in 7th grade
how the function
y = a + b*x
I see
works by putting a and b on sliders and observing how the function goes up or down or changes its slope, making the functional behavior visible
and much easier to understand.
Extensions of this work may make it possible make draw objects or impress pages being represented by models, making it possible that even
presentations themselves can meet the science requirements of traceability and repeatability and thus can be exchanged as scientific
work.
This would be another incredible killer feature, indeed.
You may also use it for designing new control and navigation algorithms for
spacecraft going to the moon, Mars or beyond.
That's extremely intersting.
We propose to also include this in OOo4Kids.
What do you think?
I think this work is extremely intersting. Nevertheless, before to go
further, We'd need more information about what has been done, about
portability .. and so on, to see whether this will desserve to be
integrated into OpenOffice.org (as extension probably, or more subtily)
Last but not least, the *first* suggestion coming in my mind, is that
you (and Tino Jungebloud ) could propose a paper for the next OOoCon
(Orvieto, Italy). There will be a topic Education, and this *is* IMHO
the right place for presenting such enhancements.
See :
http://conference.services.openoffice.org/index.php/ooocon/2009
http://conference.services.openoffice.org/index.php/ooocon/2009/schedConf/cfp
http://conference.services.openoffice.org/index.php/ooocon/2009/schedConf/timeline
If somebody is interested we can send you a copy of the thesis (in German).
I can read German, but I'm not sure to understand everything. Do you
think I can have a look at it ?
Other possibility: we use a lot IRC, and
Thanks in advance for you opinion,
Thanks to you to have forwarded the information !
Regards,
Eric Bachard
--
Education Project:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Education_Project
Projet OOo4Kids : http://wiki.ooo4kids.org/index.php/Main_Page
L'association EducOOo : http://www.educoo.org
Blog : http://eric.bachard.free.fr/news
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