Hi Eric + all,
congratulations for the great idea of doing an OOo version for
education. Like MS Office, OOo has functionality aimed for offices and
does not consider the requirements for education and learning.
Learning is forming models in our heads and playing and manipulating
them. Numbers themselves are just facts.
However, spreadsheets like Calc are hiding models and are just
displaying numbers. Therefore they do not further learning. Additionally
they are nearly impossible to debug for complex problems.
With the complexity of our technology are increasing by a factor 100
very 10 years with the increase of chip capabilities. Understanding the
systems around us or developing new ones can only be done based on
computer models. It is critical for our society and for our
technological progress that this is taking place already in schools,
colleges and universities.
With OOo freely available everywhere, it is an excellent platform to
provide for this functionality for supporting learning and research.
As a step towards this goal Tino Jungebloud wrote a Diploma thesis, in
which he intergrated the open source tool Octave (similar to Matlab) in
OOo. This integration makes it possible to use Octave in OOo for like
Calc or other applications + combine functionaliy of Calc and Octave.
Octave includes Linear Algebra libraries, integrators for simulation + a
huge libraries of numerical mathematics. You may use this for
mathematical experiments like changing parameters with a slider in Calc
and observing how the outcome of a simulation in Octave and its
graphical output is changing.
As an example this may be used for teaching in introductory math in 7th
grade how the function
y = a + b*x
works by putting a and b on sliders and observing how the function goes
up or down or changes its slope, making the functional behavior visible
and much easier to understand.
Extensions of this work may make it possible make draw objects or
impress pages being represented by models, making it possible that even
presentations themselves can meet the science requirements of
traceability and repeatability and thus can be exchanged as scientific work.
You may also use it for designing new control and navigation algorithms
for spacecraft going to the moon, Mars or beyond.
We propose to also include this in OOo4Kids.
What do you think?
If somebody is interested we can send you a copy of the thesis (in German).
Thanks in advance for you opinion,
Horst Salzwedel
Tino Jungebloud
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