My daughter Léah is barely 7 years old and at school she already has timed math tests. In 1.30 minute she must process the maximum of operations and get them right. She does not perform well in this area, she does not understand the concept of the timing and she just answers at her leisurely pace... So I said to myself, (as all parents do), let's try to get Léah improve her skills and let's code a KDE app which will do the job (well, most parents won't take this step). Hence I started Kalcul in trunk/playground/edu which displays an operation and waits for the kid to answer. Maximum numbers are configurable as well as maximum for the result (Léah does + and - up to 10 as for now). I needed a timer and Pinotree, always helpful, suggested that I use the one Arnold made in his new KVerbos. Exactly what I needed, we thus promoted the clock to KClock, the first KDE-Edu widget (also in playground/edu/widgets).
I also would like a nice result dialog, there is one in libkdegames I think but a flexible Result Dialog would be another great edu widget. What about wrong result standing out with some color? What about including a picture of something? an animation?
Another interesting thing would be to record the progress of the child. I am sure Léah will be able to use Kalcul on her own but as a parent, I want to know how she performed and to detect her weaknesses. My idea is to record the test data and then to display it with a KOffice application. Speaking to Lauri, she suggested CSV format which is simple enough and also can directly be fed into KSpread and KChart. In a school, such a scheme would allow to follow the progress of the pupils (with a few templates for KChart and KSpread).
Any suggestion you can have about all that would be welcome. Where to save that data? How to access it? (interface)
I also would like to have a Canvas area in Kalcul and display some sprites to visualize the operation (2 + 3 would display 2 apples and 3 apples, by moving them, the kid could count them => especially for multiplication this will help children to understand the concept). I am not sure how to do that GUI-wise. Again, any suggestion would be helpful. You can have a look at what I did so far at http://edu.kde.org/kalcul/screenshots.php. The TODO also http://edu.kde.org/kalcul/todo.php explains some of my questions.
"'Cause if I ever hold that golden dream again,
I want to tell you I'm gonna name it after you"
3 comments:
My nephews and nieces are enrolled in a program which requires them to do something similar to what you describe. They are provided with worksheets containing math problems which they have to answer perfectly within a certain time limit. They are also provided with a stopwatch to monitor their progress.
It seemed easy enough so I thought about writing a program which I guess would be quite similar to Kalcul, but mainly with the intention of saving trees. However, I observed that some of the kids, although they are encouraged to do all computations in their heads, needed to do some "scratch work" before they could come up with an answer. This is especially true for problems such as adding a series of multi-digit numbers or problems involving multiple operators.
This observation was the showstopper for me. If the kid had to focus on the monitor (to read and comprehend the problem), then switch focus to pencil and paper (to solve the problem), and then switch back to the monitor (to input the answer), their "completion time" would be greatly increased. I concluded that their current method (pencil, paper, stopwatch) is the best solution unless something like a tablet pc is involved.
> we thus promoted the clock to KClock, the first KDE-Edu widget
KPlotWidget?
;-) yes, you're right, KEduPlot was the first widget, sorry about that!
Indeed you lead the path to KDE-Edu having its own useful tools.
KStars rocks!
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