Last night I had a very interresting discussion in the pub about how we, as people, affect the world and how much of what we do actually makes this world a better place. While V. is more the person to go the the poor countries and help out there with nutrition and such basic-human-needs, I have been more looking at the higher levels of the pyramid of needs.
Deep discussions aside, education is what I believe is a basic human right that all people should be able to get. At a fairly early age I loved playing on the computer. At school we had a computer that we connected to a set of lamps and sending a byte to the parallel port made the lights turn on/off based on the bits that are set or unset.
I’m pretty sure that this helped me thinking in binary code for years to come (very useful skill in computer science).
Education can be playful, if we design the tools to be playful. Children book publishers learned this lesson ages ago, but computer general-purpos software has been lacking.
One of the tools that children (and grownups too!) use everywhere is a tool to enter text into a computer. At trolltech I work together with some of the coolest and smartest people I know to make sure that the text engine is the best it can be. We want people writing in Hindi to use this as well as people in Norway, so there is a lot of complexity there to allow for all the different writing styles known around the world. (more about that in my next blog)
At the same time children will not really care about 95% of the features you find in a typical word processor. They, even more then most people, want to be shielded from all that complexity.
Some years ago the idea came up to fork KWord and refurbish it to be more stripped down, and have simpler and bigger buttons. The effort was applauded by many but in the end didn’t really work out. It was a great heads up and I took it with me for the next generation of the applications.
As I’ve been working on KOffice2 high-level design I had 2 user groups in mind, the lawyers office and the Kids “office”. The two extremes that I wanted to be able to both have a real use for KOffice. In the last days I finalized a plugin for KOffice that is targetted directly to the “kids office”.
I reused the artwork that was created for the kids-office by Dannya well over 2 years ago and ended up with a simple replacement for the more complex standard interface. I hope that kids, and many parents, will appreciate this new user interface.
The simple-text plugin, like all other plugins can be enabled/disabled (or simply not be installed) for people that want a certain look. This makes it possible for one application to be used by all users in the market. The more the user needs, the more plugins he enables. Or in the case of our educational setting we disable most plugins and hide the default dockers.
Feedback is naturally appreciated and I certainly hope that educational distros or just schools will install KOffice2 with their modifications to the default to make it perfect for their target audience. This is what I call user power!
Who is the first to start a new page on the friends of KOffice wiki to write how they use or want to use KOffice in educational settings?
Screenshot here;
9 Responses to “KOffice in educational settings.”
Great news! Thanks in advance from my childs 
Cool. I think a even bigger market than children are old people. Not long ago my grandpa started to use his letters with his computer and he had big troubles pressing all these tiny buttons and unintendendly moving toolbars. This would have helped him quite a lot
PS. your security code is quite long an hard to read, please use a simpler and shorter one
Just an idea, but… wouldn’t it be better to, instead of making children use things like bold, and italics, introduce them to a more semantic way of working? I mean, why not introduce them to using styles in a simple way, and get them away from directly using markup while they’re young…
This is a great idea, I was not sure where KO2 was headed with some of the things I had read about the planned look and feel and functionality. I knew that there was going to be come common features and even interoperabilities between the various office applications. But if KWord will range all the all the way from a Text Editor, and even past Word Processor, to Publisher, all with plug-ins or add-ons, that will be flexability plus. With third party add-in replacements, the thing could be customizable, and functional to the Nth degree. No two set-ups would have to look or operate the same.
This kind of flexibility will make KOffice a very attractive target for platforms like OLPC or even developers looking to repurpose KOffice for things like tablet PCs. The development of Flake seemed so very important but it is hard to say exactly why but this article gives a better idea of the full potential of KOffice 2.
> unintendendly moving toolbars
unintentionially moving toolbars is surprising at first but I’ve come to see it as a bigger problem. customisation is something great ideally the defaults should be good and customisation rarely needed. toolbars really should be locked in place by default.
there may be some small disadvantage to making customisation features less easily - accidentally - discoverable but those who most want those features are those best able to find them and conversely those who don’t need them are the least able to deal with hitting them accidentally.
@Andre: I think this new panel is mostly aimed at people that won’t create documents with more then one or two styles. So the styles thingy is overkill. Naturally, as soon as those people progress to a bigger set of styles they can start using the ‘normal’ docker which is fully styles oriented.
Hmm, thinking about it, I guess we should make the dialog auto-create styles somehow so the transition goes even smoother. Any volunteers for working on that?
@Tom: you totally got the idea
@Alan: KDE4 already has a ‘Lock toolbars’ feature, I’m confused why its not enabled per default. Your logic gives the perfect reason for why KDE should do that 
I suggest to make this program a bit less word processor and a bit more a paint program. Kids think writing as a particular mode of painting.
A “click and type” would be great, combined with a rubber tool. It would give a more realistic idea of writing, particularry if you immagine to write on a page with rows (like real life notebooks). i.e. http://ingwa2.blogspot.com/2005/09/koffice-kids-office.html
I think something like the potato guy, text versioned (with the ability to add images too, of course)
I think it is very good idea. Kids like to write. And if they can write ‘as big do’ they are very serious and very interested in it. Doing koffice an office for kids you will do big step in educational software.
I hope those formating icons wont be so huge on Koffice2. I understand those should be big on kids version but c’mon, for normal usage those are HUGE sized. I loved smaller ones on KDE4 RC version but when i opened formation panel, i got almoust heart attack because they toke almoust all the space what my 1280×800 monitor allows on vertical space.
So do we get them smaller size and im just missunderstand or will they stay as that? 1/4 size of those is ideal…