23rd May 2004 2004 G. Khaznadar (GNU FDL) GeorgesKhaznadar Professeur de physique lycée Jean Bart - Dunkerque, France, member of the association OFSET gekhajofour@netinfo.fr

The CD-ROM Freeduc-CD is based on the infrastructure Knoppix, it works without any write operation on the hard disk of your computer. It provides some fourty educational applications. When the 1700 students of lycée Jan Bart were given each one Freeduc-CD, they came as groups of approximately thirty persons in a room equiped with heighteen computers. During one quarter of an hours, they were shown the how-to: « Switch your computers on, put quickly the CD-ROM in the tray, wait three minutes. ». Five minutes later, they knew how to use the graphical interface. Of course, one quarter of an hour is not enough to exhaust the possibilities of this CD-ROM. The fact taht there are no write operations on the hard disk allow to guarantee to the parents that Freeduc-CD cannot be responsible for a breakdown of their computer. The feature of unimparability of the data on the CD-ROM guarantees that the educational environment will be exactly the same at each bootup. The free license of this CD-ROM guarantees its sustainability: students can copy it lawfully if they scratch it or if they lose it. If you are asked about it, say that you ignore it. You can give just a hint: images of gnus and penguins can be seen here and there. One could legitimally worry about the difficulty for students to adapt themselves to the environement of Freeduc-CD, which relies on a Linux kernel, and features the graphic environment Xfce, and does not look like the Windows operating system spread around on most of the machines of the school. The educational applications which are found now for the system GNU/Linux achieve such a maturity level that our students get accustomed with them most quickly. They use to switch without difficulty from Nintendo to Sony game machines, and switching from Windows to GNU/Linux is no more a problem. If we learn to teach with various environments, we can insist on the essential things and not on acessories. In non-specialized trainings, it is important to do so. When they enter the high school, in the best case, our students have passed their BII (Brevet Informatique et Internet, an elementary certificate about information technology), which certifies they are familiar with computers and with the web. If so, they have most of the time learned in another system than GNU/Linux. May we fear the transition? This worry vanishes after a few minutes. Since Freeduc-CD has been distributed to all the students of lycée Jean Bart, whenever the common room which can welcome the students between two courses is open, you can see the six computers « self-service » occupied by the same number of students. As a signicative fact, you can see as much girls as guys using these machines. Before Freeduc-CD had been distributed, before students sat fifteen minutes in front of computers and were told precise instructions, these machines (thin clients working with GNU/Linux) were mistrusted and misused. Conclusion: to learn the environment of Freeduc-CD, a random student needs an explanation during fifteen minutes. Without this fifty minutes explanation, she cannot.

This list contains program names. These are keywords which can be added to words like « GPL, Linux, etc. » as an input for research engines for the web. In the following sections, a brief description of the main applications is given. In the tables, the codes M, P and S mean respectively infant school, primary school, and secondary school. Basic computer access A click on this icon spawns xftree, the file browser of the XFCE desktop. Features accessible from this drawer range from executing a program, to opening or formating a floppy disk. More advanced features like seeking a file, browsing a Windows network neighborhood and managing cipher keys (GPA) are accessible too. Internet A click on this icon spawns the Internet browser Mozilla. The other applications of this drawer are: Description Niveau An e-mail client P/S A FTP client, to up/download files P/S A PDF viewer P/S Mathematics A click on this icon spawns Dr. Geo, a software of interactive geometry. The other applications of this drawer are: Description Niveau A tool for the pavings of the plane S A server of interactive exercises P/S A lightweight spreadsheet P/S A tool to plot 2D numerical data S A curve plotter S Another curve plotter S A tool for 2D interactive geometry P/S A calculator P An advanced calculator S A Chinese abacus P/S A browser for fractal curves P/S A calculator for numeric and algebraic expressions S A tool for geometry in three dimensions S Sciences A click on this icon spawns sunclock, a sophisticated clock on a planisphere. The other applications of this drawer are: Description Niveau A simulator for classic mechanics S A unit conversion utility S A tool to create maps of the sky P/S A 3D viewer for molecules S A planetarium P/S An editor for scientific and structured documents S A sophisticated clock P/S A periodic table of the elements S A molecule editor S An exploration of the Universe ! P/S Audio A click on this icon spawns audacity, an editor for audio sequences. The other applications of this drawer are: Description Niveau A tool to teach solfeggio S A sequencer S A multimedia audio browser P/S A sound recorder P/S The audio compact disk reader P/S The mixer of the audio system P/S An audio editor P/S Technology A click on this icon spawns dia, a tool to create diagrams. The other applications of this drawer are: Description Niveau An editor for printed circuit boards S A simulator/editor for numerical circuits S A morphing utility S A tool for technical drawing S A basic draw utility P An image manipulation and paint program P/S An advanced tool for vectorized drawing S A tool for vectorized drawing S A program to build diagrams P/S Geography A click on this icon spawns Xrmap, a tool to explore geographical maps and informations about countries in the world. Description Niveau A Geographic information system (GIS) S Geographic maps S Languages A click on this icon spawns Hanzim, a program on Chinese writing (classical and modern). Description Niveau Chinese ideograms P/S Learning Latin P/S Learning Spanish P/S A dictionary set P/S The dictionary utility gives access to various dictionaries: bilingual, English technical words, English usual words. To change the default dictionary, please go to the menu item Edition->Preferences and change Database. Educational games A click on this icon spawns Gcompris, an educational game featuring more than thirty activities. The other applications of this drawer are: Description Niveau Escaping from caves Grabbing diamonds Managing a city Disguising Potato Man M Chess game P/S Jigsaw puzzle P/S Chinese puzzle P/S Games of calculations in sequence P/S An educational games suite M/P There are other educational games more or less hidden, Have fun finding them ! Edition and help tools A click on this icon spawns GQview, an image viewer. The other applications of this drawer are: Description Niveau The free office suite P/S Image viewer P/S Layout and desktop publishing tool P/S Lightweight word-processor P/S Basic text editor P/S Screen magnifying utility HTML page editor of Mozilla Browser for system help (man) Browser for system help (info) In addition, the icon gives access to inline help, please be patient since it needs to launch an Internet browser. A program without a documentation is not quickly usable for general educative purposes. Various teachers have written precise documentations for the programs embedded in Freeduc-CD. Educational cards gathered by the department of Free Software of the SCÉRÉN framework are reachable on the server of Académie de Versailles. Here are links to descriptions of educational programs , descriptions of multimedia programs , and description of multi-purpose programs , like word processors, internet browsers, etc. The descriptive cards gathered by OFSET are available in the book of Freeduc, which exists both in-line and printed, in various languages: in English in Spanish in French in Italian You can buy the french book (122 pages) here after the conference. It is also available by mail, for the members of the associationOFSET. The two documentation series are closely connected. If you want to document these programs, you would better take and improve these existing works in this topic, as explicitly allowed by their free licenses. For many projects related to free software, large scale publication occurs early. The community of users is prompted to participate to the warm-up cycle and to test the features of the programs (debugging, translating, documenting). Unsurprisingly, we are observing more loopback about bugs, by the mailing lists used by OFSET members (usually about hardware not recognized at boot time), than structured loopback about about educative usages in the classroom. The other type of loopback we get often is the expression of a satisfaction and of a great enthusiasm. A recurring theme is a discussion about the choice of the window manager (currently Xfce). 1700 units Freeduc-CD have been distributed to the students of lycée Jean Bart in Dunkerque (France), between the 13th and the 17th April 2004. The School Cooperative, conforming to the decision taken some months ago in its general assembly, used a budget of 15 k€ for it. The CDROMs were pressed by the magazine Linux Pratique, which distributed them joined to its issue ♯21, published in January 2004. As payment for 6 articles written about the operation organized in lycée Jean Bart, we recieved an extra issue of the pressed CDROM. Then the cooperative bought custom cases (like cases for DVD media), with a personnalized cover and a booklet of 12 pages to document it. Since then, the students have had two free weeks, came back to school for the end of the academic year. As to now, the main indication we can observe is a very regular usage of the computers available as self-service machines in the « permanence » room. These machines are thin clients, which boot into the same environment as Freeduc-CD. This means about 800 hours of usage of these computers and of internet browsing. Outstanding facts are the following: No breakdown, no « first May virus », A usage mainly directed towards communication activities (internet access), and secondarily towards document edition: every student can access her private data as soon as authentified, and work with word processors, often using data found from their research in internet, Girls access the self-service computers as often as boys.

To output a new version of Freeduc-CD, one need a computer not older than two years, and some know-how related to the Debian software distribution. Modifying a minor part of the CDROM is a matter of half an hour of computing. Everything other is a matter of documentary engineering. It is possible to compose a CRDOM like Freeduc-CD with different contents. There is an increasing number of live CDROMs based on the distributions Debian (Knoppix, Morphix), Mandrake, Suse. The technical quality of the package from the Debian distribution allows gathering them quite transparently. One has just to manage what is not taken in account automatically: linking the chosen programs with a coherent educative documentation, and integrate it all into the User Interface smoothly. Taking the opportunity of a training to LaTeX organized in March 2004 by CRDP de Lille , Université du Littoral , assocation Gutenberg et association CLX , a derived CDROM has been worked out, on which can be found various tools for text processing, featuring a complete environment for high-quality digital publishing. The association OFSET owns enough know-how about creating media derived from Freeduc-CD, it is contracting for some projects of specific distributions.