Hi, Dont know if you speak Dutch or French, so answering in English, although also belgian ... :)
If you speak French, feel free to answer in this language. I'm a sysadmin at Tiscali Belgium , and i had my studies as a teacher (6-12-year children - ecole primaire) - i wrote an end-cycle work (travail de fin d'etudes) about the use of the computer at primary school. I can give you a few references in french about your question, but i dont have them here - send an email if interested. But here is something looking as an answer : i think that you loose a part of your children's energy by letting them alone in front of a computer. It's sure that having 1 computer for 4-5 children means loosing time. I think the best combination is 2 children/box : if they are not alone in front of a problem, they can resolve it by communicating, analysing together, speaking and negotiating about the use of the available tools, and so on : so you meet a great amount of objectives you can find in the P.I. (programme integre) - for mathematics (problem solving : what can i do with the tools i have, what am i doing wrong, which is the simplest way to achieve my objective, ...) and mother language (communication : explicit an idea clearly and listen to the other - also if you let two children in front of a complex formulation, they can work together at the understanding). If you look at the P.I. in this way, you shall find a lot of objectives you can work by letting two children together in front of a Unix box ... I'm really interested in joining your project : could you contact me so we can deply something together ? I dont develop, but maybe you need hints for methodology, or a hand for English->French translations ? Have you seen that a lot of Children software have just been integrated into Debian Testing ? Regards, Dexter On Thursday 03 May 2001 13:25, Frederic Peters wrote: > Hello, > > First, a few words about me: Debian developer since 98, developer of > Gaby (apt-get'able) and contributor to a few projects. > > And now, what brings me here: I'm involved in the setup of a computer > classroom in Brussels, Belgium for a primary school (children from 3 > to 12). What we have now is a network of about 20 diskless 486 that > boots in X from a nicely powered server (running Debian of course). > We setupped recently a project on sourceforge (named 'plume') to help > other people deploy such a network. > > That was the easy part. > > I now have to write an objective paper about our setup, how it works > but also why we did it that way. One of my arguments is that this > provided one computer per child instead of one per 4 or 5 children. > I know I read somewhere a study saying basically that for an efficient > educational use you needed at least one computer per 2 children. > Does anybody here know about the references about such a study ? > > Regards, > Frederic -- Knowledge-sharing and open-source content : another way to gain eternity. Francis 'Dexter' Gois - [EMAIL PROTECTED] System Administrator - Tiscali Belgium NV/SA phone: +3224000839 - fax : +3224000899
