From October 24 to October 30, the KDE Educational team (KDE Edu) gathered for its annual work sprint at the Computer Science faculty of Universidad de A Coruña, Spain. The sprint was a mixture of hacking, discussing, getting to know more about Spanish culture, socializing, and meeting new team mates. The hot topics were:
- KDE Frameworks 5/Qt5 migration
- the user experience in language learning applications
- quality assurance for math applications
- new applications in KDE Edu
- and expansion into opportunities based on mobile.
Hacking
In the hacking sessions, KTouch (the typing trainer) received new custom lesson support that allows users to train using arbitrary texts. The QML graph plotting plugin was separated from KTouch into a new library libkqmlgraph (located in KDE-Playground). Artikulate (the pronunciation trainer) immediately adopted this library, and work was started to port training statistics to it. A major rewrite was started on Artikulate's UI, including new support for user profiles. Several important bugs in Parley (the vocabulary trainer) were fixed and open bug reports were triaged. The new math application Khipu (for plotting 2- or 3-dimensional functions, not yet released) was reviewed by the team; most identified bugs and flaws were fixed during the sprint. Khipu will eventually replace KmPlot, which only supports 2-dimensional plots. The near-future plan is to concentrate on polishing Khipu, and to finish work on the few missing features currently only present in KmPlot.
KDE Frameworks 5
The migration to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5 (Qt5/KF5) will be one of the major undertakings during the next year. KAlgebra and Analitza are the first KDE Edu applications ported to KDE Frameworks 5 and can now be used on this new foundation. The decision about when to start porting to Qt5/KF5 is up to each maintainer. However we are encouraging people to start this process by early 2014. By spring we want to have Framework branches running for each Edu application.
Mobile
New opportunities in mobile are appearing. The KDE Edu team wants to be part of mobile, and will pursue the possibilities of running on different platforms, as well as with different form factors. Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5 provide the flexibility to accomplish these goals.
Community Outreach
The KDE Edu team prepared to participate as part of the whole KDE community in this year's Google Code-In, an outreach program for high-school students to get involved in open source projects.
Thank you
The meeting was sponsored by KDE e.V. and the local free software user group GPUL (Grupo de Programadores y Usuarios de Linux). For more information, please visit the KDE Edu website or email the team.