HTML5 + JS: The Future of Open Education

HTML5 + JS: The Keys to Open Education The Karma Project http://www.karmaeducation.org [email_address] License: CC-BY 3.0

Demo First, Talk Later

Before you wade your way though 55+ slides, please take a look at the demo. If you are a web developer, please take a look at the code.

http://karma.sugarlabs.org/examples/adding_up_to_10/index.html

Everybody wants Education 2.0

Lots of universities, schools, governments want to use software in education
Kids around the world, particularly in poor countries, need interactive, free materials
The current method of education in much of the developing world is:

Teacher Speaks, Kids Repeat

An Education Myth ” Rote Learning is good for you, look at all those successful asians in the US”

Large percentage of those asians attended private schools or special public schools that look a lot like western schools, but often more rigorous
Those who attended public schools have largely succeeded on their own merits not because they had to memorize whole books as children

The Missing Teachers Who is going to teach all these kids algebra?

The Missing Teachers Talented teachers won't move to rural India, Pakistan, Nepal, Africa for another generation. Vast majority of people who know maths, English, good writing emigrate or go into private sector NOT teaching in a village

We need to fill this gigantic learning void
We need to empower good teachers and accommodate those learners that don't have access to good teachers
And You Can Help!

Bryan Berry, CTO of OLE Nepal, had interesting experience on one visit to a Nepali school. He asked a 3 rd grader what the sum of 3 + 1 is. The child enthusiastically responded “4!” Bryan then asked the child what the sum of 1 + 3 is. The child had no idea. The child had memorized addition problems but had no actual understanding of arithmetic Anecdote

Problems with Current Approaches

Most interactive educational software today suffers from one or more problems:
Proprietary (Flash)
Tied to a particular platform

KDEedu (KDE)
Pygame +PyGTK (gnome)

Very small educational dev communities – gcompris, KDEedu, Squeak

But Flash is the Standard! ” Flash is the standard for developing proprietary educational software” But the open-source Flash community is small and not very active Even Worse:

i18n mechanism too complicated
Doesn't render indic fonts properly – sorry 2 billion people!

PyGame+PyGTK are great but . . .

Time consuming to set up development environment
You can't show off your creations through the browser
Separate markup, presentation, and code? Nope
Very, very few programmers in developing countries know these technologies

If You hadn't Guessed HTML5 + Javascript are the answer

Lots of programmers in developing countries know these technologies due to outsourcing boom
Great unicode and font-rendering support
Low barrier to entry, new coder only needs text editor and browser to get started

A Lot of Work Ahead

JS still lacks standard high-level drawing functions
Browser performance is very inconsistent, particularly for certain kinds operations
Lack of good i18n mechanisms that don't require a server

Road to Karma 1

Open Learning Exchange Nepal (OLE Nepal) is a Nepali NGO implementing the OLPC project in Nepal
2000 XO laptops deployed so far
More importantly, several hundred teachers trained how to use XO's in classroom
Educational content aligned with curriculum critical to project success

Road to Karma 2

OLE Nepal has been producing open-source educational software for 2 years now
Tried squeak and pygame + pyGTK but development too time-consuming
OLE Nepal has been using Flash for last 18 months and happy with it, BUT . . .

Lack of External Support

To date, not one single developer outside of OLE Nepal team has submitted a patch despite our best efforts
Relative to the huge # of devs working w/ flash

IRC, mailing list traffic low
Limited open-source tooling and supporting documentation

The Open-Source Flash Community will likely remain small

Lack of External Support Despite the great work of the free software community on projects like Gnash and the GameSWF library, there is very little in terms of sharing and collaboration of free software Flash projects.

Insult to Injury OLE Nepal has to use images for Nepali text because Flash Player 10 does not render unicode indic fonts properly

All the Same OLE Nepal has created some amazing content using Flash It will take a ton of work to implement the same functionality in html5+js

OLE Nepal's Mission To provide comprehensive, high-quality education to every Nepali child. Must cover grades 1-8 with teacher training and interactive, high-quality, digital content aligned with national curriculum

That's a lot of Content OLE Nepal will never, ever, ever be able to create all this content on its own Creating an international movement around standard tools is a more realistic goal

Good News

There are lots of people around the world interested in creating this content

Uruguay
Paraguay
UK
USA, etc

They just need a common, open, ”easy” toolset

Karmic Inspiration

OLE Nepal needs to move from Flash to openweb technologies => Karma
Karma has generated more interest in just 4 months of existence than did 2 years of flash work
And there is only one basic example . . .

A SugarLabs Subproject

Karma is a subproject of Sugarlabs
Started as Googe Summer of Code project – thanks Google!
But Karma lessons designed to run within any html5 compliant browser, not just within Sugar
Code is MIT-licensed, content CC-BY-SA

A SugarLabs Subproject

OLE Nepal and others in Sugar community realize that to maximize amount of content created, karma can't be specific to a particular desktop environment

Who's Working on It?

Created by Bryan Berry, CTO of OLE Nepal
Main contributors so far

GsoC student Felipe López Toledo
Christoph Derndorfer, co-founder of OLPC Austria

A group of passionate people who know relatively little about web tech

Who's Working on It?

OLE Nepal has a full-time paid development team consisting of 3 teachers, 3 graphic designers, and 6 programmers
Why aren't they all working on Karma?
The government of Nepal has contracted OLE Nepal to produce a certain amount of content according to a set schedule. Shifting all development resources to Karma would jeopardize that schedule

More Requirements

Everything must work both offline and online
Only dependency should be a browser with good html5 support

Browse and Surf under the XO

EASY i18n, gettext doesn't play well w/ MVC

Text in markup needs to be easily localized
We won't have server-side templates, forget Gears

Helper scripts like the django admin.py and rails ”rails” script

Requirements for Toolset

Use only open-source components
Libraries for high-level drawing functions, audio manipulation, common bits of lesson functionality, etc.
Low Barrier to Entry
Use webdev paradigms
Convention-over-configuration a la ruby-on-rails, django

Requirements for Toolset

Web dev paradigms

Separate presentation, markup, and code
Unobtrusive javascript
Use utf-8

What We Don't Need Exciting 3D Graphics High-quality video Simple 2D is enough And this needs to run on cheap computing devices And 3D doesn't make that much of a difference, think gameplay, gameplay, gameplay

How You Can Help

High-Level libraries to ease manipulation of html5 <audio>, <canvas>, <video>
Better i18n mechanism
A JS rockstar to step up and advise the Karma project

More Specifically

Optimizing animation performance in the browser
Help with web workers
Help w/ local storage to store student progress
Lesson-specific functionality
i18n

without server-side template
Capture text in the markup and html attributes like <img alt=””> and <meta tags=””>

Logical Layout of a Karma Bundle

The base unit of karma is the ” lesson ”
Lessons are organized by grade, subject, and optional time component in a Karma bundle
Each lesson includes

Lesson Plan and Teacher's Note for teacher
Tutorial – introduce concept
Exercise – do exercises to test knowledge
Optional game – more free form opportunity to work with ideas in the lesson

Anatomy of Karma codebase

Jquery plugins
Helper scripts – presently using narwhal + rhino
Example lessons
Templates

Starting page – Chakra
Lesson Navigation
Karma lesson

Anatomy of Karma cont'd

A formal specification (under rapid development): wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Karma/Specifications
Set of conventions for most common configurations very much in the style of ruby-on-rails and django
No server-side components or even server-side emulation like Gears

The Kurrent Karma Plugin

Karma Animation

Canvas manipulation
Presently not using SVG. When should we use svg? When use canvas?

The content must run under OLPC XO-1
SVG tests crashed the XO-1
Canvas tests works better under XO-1

Created own plugin: jquery.karma.js

Karma Animation Felipe tried RaphaelJS (http://raphaeljs.com/) demos to test SVG animations on the XO but it either crashed or suffered horrible performance Since canvas is low level, better performance … But it's really easy to manipulate SVG Objects Karma doesn't support SVG as of version 0.1 but we would like to in the future

Karma Animation 2

Need something simple and high-level

processing.js great but complex to use

It uses processing syntax.
It uses a parser, so it’s slower than JS.
It’s not designed to work on low-power machines like the XO (433 Mhz processor, 256 MB RAM).

Browser Optimization

Karma lessons must run on the XO-1.

Default browser: Sugar Browse ( based on Gecko )
Experimental: Surf ( based on webkit )
No problem rendering HTML common elements
Canvas rendering may be slow Quadrilaterals demo
Several lag on Browse (unusable)
Works nice on Surf

Browser Optimization 2

It’s preferable to spend cpu than spend memory.
Emphasize rendering speed over quality
image-rendering / firefox 3.6 alpha
webkit has nothing

Web Workers

An animation core as web worker?

Trying to combine actions with predictable behaviour.

Problems

it's not possible to send functions as worker messages, so, it's hard to use callbacks.
how to share memory (variables) between the root document and the worker thread without copying that data?

Local Storage

We need to store results from exercises in Karma lessons
Later synchronize them with moodle or another learning management system next time student can connect

i18n

i18n is too hard
Current i18n mechanisms require a server-side template – smarty, erb, django's? –
Or putting all your strings in js code
Gettext's _(””) works for js code but not for markup
We need something more intuitive

Specific i18n Needs

Need to translate text in markup not just stuff marked _(””), even including inline markup
Need to use native numerals – Arabic, Hindi, Nepali use different symbols for digits
Need to change out audio, images, and even numerals per locale

More i18n

Gettext should translate all strings in <body> unless marked explicitly otherwise – perhaps using lang attribute?
The markup still needs to be valid html5!
Plus, need to translate certain attributes such as <img alt=””> and tags in header such as title, meta
CSS background images and fonts

Doing Everything on document.ready()

Since we can't use something like a server-side template, all localization has to happen in function called on document.ready()

Switching out images
Audio
Text

Will this actually work for a complex pages on machines with limited resources like the OLPC XO-1?

Inline markup is a headache

<div>the <big>Highest<big> score is <label id=”highScore”></label></div>
We need grab everything between <div> . . . </div>, put it in the .pot file, and later write back the translated HTML on page load, not just text
Anyone got a better idea?

Could you help?