Thread: [Tuxmath-devel] Tuxmath & schools

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Hi tuxmathers,

I had an interesting meeting with my daughters' computer teacher, who may 
coordinate giving tuxmath a try in their school. I thought that it might be 
worthwhile sharing his observations with others on the list.

1. First, David's work on the options/menu code is clearly a good thing; 
apparently your typical teacher won't edit a config file. (I just updated and 
haven't yet had a chance to see what's happening in detail, but it sounds 
like a good direction to go in. I'm excited to see how this evolves.)
 What sounds necessary is basically a set of options files that one could use 
("Kindergarten", "First grade", etc?) in a menu of choices. Perhaps a 
school's computer teacher could tweak the files, but the typical classroom 
teacher apparently won't.

2. Packaging may be something worth thinking more about; the typical school 
environment might want to have this installed on the server and not on all 
the computers individually. I haven't personally thought a lot about how one 
handles things like the placement of the options files---presumably this 
could be handled by having the tuxmath "binary" actually be a shell script 
that launches the true binary and but also specifies the location of the 
options files? (the point being that the shell script is of course editable 
by whoever installs on the school's server, so that person can change the 
location.) Others may already know the right answer here (and maybe it's even 
already implemented...) Maybe we need some kind of "installer" that asks this 
question?

3. Similar to what David indicated in the TODO list from Nov. 18, the "blowing 
up" of the cities could present a problem. In the teacher's words, "it only 
takes one parent to complain." This may be more relevant for young kids than 
older kids (both I and my third grader like it that they blow up, and I 
imagine that many others might too, so I'm not arguing for complete 
elimination). He suggested having an option to have the cities _not_ explode 
as perhaps the simplest thing to do. (Shields could disappear, but nothing 
worse happens? Or maybe an "ouch" or "rats" sound or something, but nothing 
more violent?) Anyway, something to think about.

4. Our school, at least, seems to be moving to try to collect more performance 
data from the programs. He indicated that it would be fine if it doesn't 
report back, but that reporting data would be a big plus. Tuxmath already 
does that, but perhaps not in a way that (our) school could take advantage 
of: at my daughters' school every kid logs in with the username "student," so 
there's nothing about the /home directory that gives any indication about the 
kid's identity. He showed me a couple of educational programs that implement 
a pull-down menu with the names of all kids in the class, and kids have to 
select their own name to get the program running. (Apparently kids are 
usually honest about these things...)

5. He was somewhat concerned about the diversity of performance levels within 
a class with regards to the speed settings. I'll tentatively suggest that 
perhaps one way to handle this is to make "feedback" be the default mode? 
(Disclaimer: since I wrote that code, I'm probably biased...)

6. Sadly, the Mac OS X version does _not_ transfer well from one machine to 
another. So, I haven't got that disk image working correctly yet (sorry 
everyone)---as of now only compiling from scratch works. I'll spend more time 
looking at the other tux4kids programs to see how they do it---thanks to Bill 
for a helpful email about that (wish I'd remembered it earlier...) some time 
ago.

Best,
--Tim

Thread: [Tuxmath-devel] Tuxmath & schools

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