Please let me help you develop a somewhat familar and somewhat different thought pattern if you want to work with me or others to develop activities which will be accepted into the activity repositories of One Laptop Per Child.
The Bible was written so that people could follow the instructions in it in order to live life as God intended and have eternal life. Following instructions, imitating others, and participating in discovery learning are all activities that a child can enjoy while becoming a better person. In OLPC terminology this is playful learning. Reading is an activity but for most children it is not playful learning unless it is enhanced with goals, feedback, and the other crudements of enjoyment and education which enhanced and indeed made possible by computers and in particular the One Laptop Per Child. Many of the best web pages are put together by a team that may include a business manager who is not able to do web design or programming, a programmer who is unable to do business management or web design, and a web designer who is unable to do business management or programming. Playful learning Bible software that will be put into the repositories of laptop.org or the other repositories from which a child will check out an activity will most likely be put together by a team. A very multi-talented person might be able to build a few Bible-based playful learning activities which would pass the strict scrutiny of repository authorities who would otherwise reject anything from believers. Solomon said there is wisdom in an abundance of counselors. The need for multiple counselors and multiple talents increases as undertakings become bigger, more difficult, and more important. At Pycon 2007, some Python experts worked with me on the simple task of using discovery learning to identify what huge mess of English spellings are used in traditional orthography to represent each of the sounds in one dialect of English. The phonology of Japanese as it existed a few decades ago was described with 8 rules. I was told that someone wrote 31 pages of rules for English then gave up. I still view it as a simple task compared to the traveling salesman problem. Although I am not sure of a perfect solution, obviously partial solutions exist with computer assistance that are better and faster than what a child could do without computer assistance. However in working with this simple task we quickly discovered ways to make it much more playful and much more educational if we had the benefit of a bottom-up data-driven parser. Although data-driven parsers have been written in other languages it has a much greater chance of acceptance by OLPC if it is written in Python so that the child can use discovery learning for the dialect of Arabic, English, Japanese, or Zzuluwahali which the child is learning. If it is in Python then the child can hit the button intended to help the child learn the computer program source behind the computer assistance which the child is receiving to most easily move from the sounds of the language to the proper spelling of those sounds. So I am looking for programmers better than I, to help me construct a data-driven Python parser plus the playful learning ways to use it to help the OLPC users for this simple task and much more complex playful learning activities using the words, the discourse structure, and the other attributes which make the Bible the world's best selling book. The strongest plank in the OLPC human interface is that it will run activities for children not applications. GnomeSword, BibleTime and other Sword applications are great applications for mature Bible truth seekers who are have been raised where they often hear the world's best selling most quoted book. These applications are designed to search for terms that the truth seeker has heard or to just enable someone to read the Bible who has access to a computer with sufficient memory. Ages ago, I taught high-school history while studying for my first graduate degree. I used to teach those students that the world has undergone 4 great stages of learning. #1 God spoke to the most ancient prophets. Only a very few people heard, obeyed, and reaped the benefits. #2 God had Moses write down His Message. Most of a whole nation and occassionaly some people from other nations, sometimes studied, obeyed, and reaped the benefits of that Message. #3 Jesus Christ completed His work on earth and the Holy Spirit descended, the early church was busy every day in every house doing and teaching that same Message and how it must penetrate and change every activity of every believer. This revolution spread until it was heard by every creature. But then it the dark ages came when only the religious leaders studied the Message. #4 When the Message was printed, it spread resulting in universities, hospitals, and even the United States of America being built by people who wanted to obey that Message and reap the benefits of obedience. Now #5 is before us. The computer enables the Message to be spread with enjoyable activities. People who do not care to read the printed Bible could become addicted to spending a little time every day in enjoyable Bible learning activities with some of my designs. I once did a project which was shown at the National Computer Conference with the assistance of only two programmers. Both of them started by saying the project was not possible without a larger much better educated team and a timeline of no less than 1250% of the available time before NCC. It involved the use of the most sophisticated compiler-compiler available to me at the time. Yes, a data-driven parser in Python or any other language is more difficult. But we can do it and many other things before OLPC is widely distributed if we will believe and use everything God will supply. If you do not know anything about what I have said thusfar but you know how to read and respond to e-mail, please contact me at the e-mail address of this post. This post is already too long. But I will make another post to show how you could use the Sword to develop a OLPC activity that could be accepted into a few local OLPC repositories. Thank you for your attention. I hope we can help each other to use Python to get into the best OLPC repositories. If you cannot, then I hope that you will use my upcoming design to get something you do into some repositories. My little love and God's BIG LOVE, a volunteer, DrStovallFoundation.com --- "Troy A. Griffitts" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > First, my apologies for being so absent lately. I'm excited to see all > the traffic. Should be back in the swing of things in a week or so. > > Sean Kennedy wrote: > > Since these devices are supposed to be networked most of the time, maybe > > a web app would be a better fit. > > We have a full-featured web application available at: > > http://crosswire.org/study/ > > As much work as we have put into this application (and honestly, I use > it more than any other application for my personal study), as was > commented in another post, I also think it would be nice to allow the > users to download and take home a Bible or two when they have internet > access, which Bibletime and Gnomesword allow with their builtin remote > module installers. Was there still any hope either of these might run? > > -Troy. > > > > I think that would have appeal beyond > > the OLPC crowd ... of course, then someone has to host it ... unless it > > is small enough to be run right on the local machine (in which case > > everything would have to be done client side, because there won't be a > > server daemon on that hardware) > > > > Programming is fun again when hardware limitations have to be considered! __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ sword-devel mailing list: sword-devel@crosswire.org http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel Instructions to unsubscribe/change your settings at above page