The document discusses the Karma Project, which aims to create open educational content using HTML5 and JavaScript. It notes challenges like the lack of teachers in rural areas, issues with current educational software approaches, and the needs of the Karma toolset and content. Key goals are outlined, such as creating a common set of tools to allow international collaboration, addressing issues like browser performance and localization, and requesting help from developers.

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

4. Kids around the world, particularly in poor countries, need interactive, free materials

5. The current method of education in much of the developing world is: Teacher Speaks, Kids Repeat

7. Those who attended public schools have largely succeeded on their own merits not because they had to memorize whole books as children

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

9. 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

11. We need to empower good teachers and accommodate those learners that don't have access to good teachers

12. And You Can Help!

13. 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

15. Proprietary (Flash)

19. Doesn't render indic fonts properly – sorry 2 billion people!

21. You can't show off your creations through the browser

22. Separate markup, presentation, and code? Nope

23. Very, very few programmers in developing countries know these technologies

25. Great unicode and font-rendering support

26. Low barrier to entry, new coder only needs text editor and browser to get started

28. Browser performance is very inconsistent, particularly for certain kinds operations

29. Lack of good i18n mechanisms that don't require a server

31. 2000 XO laptops deployed so far

32. More importantly, several hundred teachers trained how to use XO's in classroom

33. Educational content aligned with curriculum critical to project success

35. Tried squeak and pygame + pyGTK but development too time-consuming

36. OLE Nepal has been using Flash for last 18 months and happy with it, BUT . . .

39. Limited open-source tooling and supporting documentation The Open-Source Flash Community will likely remain small

40. 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.

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

42. 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

43. 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

44. 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

46. Paraguay

47. UK

50. Karma has generated more interest in just 4 months of existence than did 2 years of flash work

51. And there is only one basic example . . .

53. Started as Googe Summer of Code project – thanks Google!

54. But Karma lessons designed to run within any html5 compliant browser, not just within Sugar

55. Code is MIT-licensed, content CC-BY-SA

61. Why aren't they all working on Karma?

62. 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

67. Libraries for high-level drawing functions, audio manipulation, common bits of lesson functionality, etc.

68. Low Barrier to Entry

69. Use webdev paradigms

70. Convention-over-configuration a la ruby-on-rails, django

72. Unobtrusive javascript

73. Use utf-8

74. 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

76. Better i18n mechanism

77. A JS rockstar to step up and advise the Karma project

79. Help with web workers

80. Help w/ local storage to store student progress

81. Lesson-specific functionality

83. Capture text in the markup and html attributes like <img alt=””> and <meta tags=””>

85. Lessons are organized by grade, subject, and optional time component in a Karma bundle

87. Tutorial – introduce concept

88. Exercise – do exercises to test knowledge

89. Optional game – more free form opportunity to work with ideas in the lesson

91. Helper scripts – presently using narwhal + rhino

92. Example lessons

94. Lesson Navigation

95. Karma lesson

97. Set of conventions for most common configurations very much in the style of ruby-on-rails and django

98. No server-side components or even server-side emulation like Gears

99. The Kurrent Karma Plugin

102. SVG tests crashed the XO-1

104. 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

106. It uses a parser, so it’s slower than JS.

107. It’s not designed to work on low-power machines like the XO (433 Mhz processor, 256 MB RAM).

109. Experimental: Surf ( based on webkit )

110. No problem rendering HTML common elements

111. Canvas rendering may be slow Quadrilaterals demo

112. Several lag on Browse (unusable)

113. Works nice on Surf

115. Emphasize rendering speed over quality

116. image-rendering / firefox 3.6 alpha

117. webkit has nothing

119. how to share memory (variables) between the root document and the worker thread without copying that data?

121. Later synchronize them with moodle or another learning management system next time student can connect

123. Current i18n mechanisms require a server-side template – smarty, erb, django's? –

124. Or putting all your strings in js code

125. Gettext's _(””) works for js code but not for markup

126. We need something more intuitive

128. Need to use native numerals – Arabic, Hindi, Nepali use different symbols for digits

129. Need to change out audio, images, and even numerals per locale

131. The markup still needs to be valid html5!

132. Plus, need to translate certain attributes such as <img alt=””> and tags in header such as title, meta

133. CSS background images and fonts

135. Audio

138. 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

139. Anyone got a better idea?

141. Rotation

142. Skew

143. Masks

144. Image sprite support

147. Html2json?

148. Internationalizing javascript code is much easier that internationalizing HTML

152. JS Rockstars on a biweekly basis

154. We would love help from any interested parties

158. Wiki page: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/karma

159. Code: http://git.sugarlabs.org/project/karma