Karma Code Less Teach More

Karma: The Code Less, Teach More Software Framework OLE Nepal Bryan Willson Berry http://www.karmaeducation.org [email_address] License: CC-BY 3.0

Demo First, Talk Later
Before you wade your way though these 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/

Promise and Peril of Education Software Educational Software has tremendous promise, but . . . It is far to expensive to produce We spend too much time focused on the engineering side (coding) and not enough on the education side (teaching)

Reinventing the Wheel Most educational software packages use proprietary toolkits (flash) and the few open-source packages use heavily-customized and poorly documented libraries. As a result, it is often easiest to create your own tools, widgets, human interface guidelines, and workflows from scratch

So Let's Steal . . . The tooling, widgets, and platform from another industry, the web development industry There is a plethora of fast evolving web development tools that are now mature enough for virtually any educational software package and they are both free as in cost and free as in speech The Openweb Toolkit

The Openweb Toolkit
JavaScript
HTML 5
CSS
SVG
Often used in conjuction with JavaScript frameworks like jQuery, dojo, mootools

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 That means tooling is limited for everyone whether you work on proprietary or free software

OLE Nepal I have been developing open-source educational software at OLE Nepal for the last 3 years We have a team of:
7 software engineers
3 graphic designers
3 instructional designers
We primarily use Flash

Openweb Envy We have seen explosive growth in the resources for web developers over the last five years
Millions of tutorials
Lots of tools
Helpful text editors
Powerful free frameworks like jQuery
And Flash has not kept pace

A Statistically Insignificant Metric At 15:43 GMT+5 on January 1 st 2010 The number of users in these freenode irc channels #actionscript 19 #flex 45 #javascript 275 #jquery 394 #dojo 74 … there are more web related channels not listed but no more flash-related ones that I am aware of

Openweb Tools Multiplying like Rabbits Growth of jQuery has been amazing, now used on 30% of all websites You can now do everything with openweb tools that you can do with flash and soon you will be able to do more Google, Apple, and others aggressively funding open-source web tools Please note that support and documentation for HTML5 and SVG are still quite immature

OLE Nepal's Progress Summer 2010, hope to move all developers from flash to openweb platform Currently, we have 2.5 developers working full-time to convert a set of legacy lessons to the openweb platform Should have 60+ classroom-ready activities completed by end of March 2010

What is Karma? Karma is a minimal JavaScript library and set of tools that makes it easier to manipulate HTML 5 and SVG in ways often required in learning activities. It plays very well with jQuery Karma leverages popular openweb technologies. It is not redundant to them. Karma will also include a set of administrative scripts, workflows, and user interface widgets built with jQuery UI

Questions? Check the demos: http://karma.sugarlabs.org See the blog http://karmaeducation.org Contact me [email_address] Join the Google Group http://groups.google.com/group/karmajs

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Karma Code Less Teach More

by Bryan Berry on Jan 02, 2010

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Karma Code Less Teach More — Presentation Transcript