Fosdem 2007-02

The Fosdem is the 'Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting is a 2 days event, organized by volunteers, to promote the widespread use of Free and Open Source software. Taking place in the beautiful city of Brussels (Belgium), FOSDEM meetings are recognized as "The best Free and Open Source events in Europe."

I did participate to this event (Bruno). I add the chance to meet several people and organizations focused in the education area. I took this opportunity to talk with the GNU/Linux distributions representatives.

In the show

In the Fosdem main street, a French consultant was making demo of embedded system on the power pc architecture. He is a fan of GCompris and made demo of it running on a minimal system and on a Play Station 3.

In another area, I discovered Tux Droid, a mini robot from the company Kysoh. It's fun and exciting, there are probably some opportunities to use it from GCompris.

For example:

• have a bonus that use it (activity completion)
• have it spell the instructions, and all audio effects
• have some component in the electricity activity that are tux droid functions. for example, the children could make it turn by connecting the battery and the 'tuxdroid turn component'.

KDE-EDU meeting

Anne-Marie from KDE EDU did organize a meeting with different organizations, all focused on education.

• KDE-EDU (Anne Marie)
• Skolelinux / Debian Edu (Kurt)
• Childsplay / Schoolplay (Stas Zytkiewicz)
• Tux4Kids (Holger Levsen)
• GCompris (Bruno)

There have been several discussions around GCompris, mostly feature request:

• Provide a less flashy skin. In Nordic and Germany teachers are used to sober interfaces in educational software. GCompris looks like a game to their eyes at a first look, and don't go further.
• Integration with the network infrastructure they have in Germany to reuse class/user definitions from a national LDAP base.
• Think about reporting in their environment (skolelinux)

There is a follow up page on the kde-edu wiki.