*In Tamil Nadu , India FSFTN has taken an initiative to take Free Software to school Students through Education, Initially We have Taken a Rural School in Outskirts of Theni Town. And Several Community Computing Centers.*
*We have planned to fork a Distro for the educational purpose and design it based on the curriculum of Tamil Nadu's Education System. And also Localize it.* *We like your suggestions on choosing the Distro, Would Your Distro be suitable for the Purpose or do you suggest any Other Alternatives* *Communnity Computing Center-Theni* *Background:* *https://discuss.fsftn.org/t/tamil-educational-software-packages-for-children/650* <https://discuss.fsftn.org/t/tamil-educational-software-packages-for-children/650> Based on this request, Prasanth and Venkatesh went to Theni district to study the requirements, infrastructure and feasibility of the project. *Site report* We visited two schools in the area. One of the schools was in Rayappanpatti village and the other was in Gokilapuram village. *Rayappanpatti Village* The schoool in Rayappanpatti is a government aided private Board High school (with 3500 students from 6th to 12th). Most of the students are from very poor backgrounds. They have a lab with around 25 computers all of which run Windows XP. We had a discusson with the computer teachers of the school. From class VI, students are allowed to come to the computer lab. However, in the absence of any syllabus, they are mainly taught Paint and the MS Office suite. The teachers said they gave up on ide of teaching C language to 9th graders, since Turbo C couldn't be installed We also had a discusson with the correspondent. He gave us a free hand to do anything we like with respect to computer education till class VIII. He was also keen on introducing the education of other subjects through digital methods (like IT@school in Kerala) as and when we could implement. *Gokilapuram Village* Gokilapuram has a small school run by the Harijan Seva Sangh. There are 55 students stuudying there from classes I-VIII. They don't have a computer there. The trust who took us to these villages is planning to buy them a couple of desktops. Since they also don't have a syllabus, they are open to any ideas we give them. Medium of education in both these schools is Tamil. *What we can do* The idea of this Initiative is to introduce Free and Open source software to school childern through their curriculum, and to do so at a stage when they are first exposed to computers. This can first be through defining a computer science syllabus for them. Later, after students get used to it, we can look at the idea of bringing in educational packages for all subjects. Initially, it would be wise to take up just class VI and define a syllabus and give them the tools for that and as that batch progresses, we can give them more options in the future years. This also helpos us evaluate and enhance the syllabus and prepare a more elaborate one for the next year. Ideally, we can create a distro which can, to start with, have the following tools *Sl. NO.* *Tool Name* *Properaitery tool alterntive* *Type* 1 mPaint MS Paint Paint application 2 LibreDraw MS visio/CorelDraw Vector Graphics editor 3 LibreWriter Msword Document Writer 4 Gedit Notepad Text Editor 5 LibreImpress MS Powerpoint Presentation 6 Tamil99 None Keybord Layout 7 HTML NONE Hypertext markup We can also add whatever educational packages we can localise. But in addition to this, we need to define a proper syllabus for class VI. For this, we could take a look at CBSE syallbus and maybe provide a series of directions -- M267
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