Anyone Know and Love Kig?
First, some background. I will be presenting a couple of FOSS and Ubuntu related sessions at the Technology in Education conference in Copper Mountain, Colorado on June 25 and 26. Information about these sessions and what I hope to accomplish can be found on the project wiki. In short, there will be a session on using FOSS in the classroom and one on setting up an LTSP server. The software session will focus on several applications that all schools should really be exploring and run in Windows so there is no real barrier to use. These include Stellarium, Maxima, Freemind, Phun and several others. Due to time restraints we can only demo a few but we will also hand out the Open Education CD to everyone.
We would also like to introduce everyone to the wonderful world of Ubuntu. My belief is that teachers (who are honestly not very tech savvy) will be more likely to venture into unknown waters if they see a payoff. Therefore, we will introduce them to a few apps that are only available to Linux users. We will accomplish this by having them use Ubuntu in a virtual machine in Windows. I think this will be easier than trying to teach them how to install Ubuntu (even Wubi may go beyond the comfort level of teachers and IT departments).
One of the apps I would really like to demo is Kig. It is a travesty that computers in schools are used almost exclusively to type papers and make flashy presentations of dubious educational value when they could (and should) be used to help students learn concepts that are difficult to grasp by reading a textbook or doing worksheets. Kig (K Interactive Geometry) is a great little program that can really help students understand many aspects of geometry and math that would be hard if they had to do it with pencil and paper.
For example, one difficult concept is the properties of polygons. Consider the triangle. Younger students have a hard time understanding the sum of angles or that the sum of two sides can never be more than the third (try to construct a 5×5x9 triangle for example). In order to explore this on paper, students would have to accurately construct a lot of triangles. With Kig, it’s only a matter of minutes to set up and then explore hundreds of variations by just dragging corners around. This is just one very simple example, but I think it illustrates the benefit of using computers to actually TEACH something.
However, as much as I love Kig, I wish it was a bit easier to use and had a few more features. For example, I cannot find a way to have the angles or length of sides automatically sum. This simple addition would make the above example easy and obvious to students. Without it, it’s much harder. Unfortunately, being a teacher and not a coder I don’t have a clue how to go about doing this. I would love to see some more development on Kig, and I will do my part to get it in the hands of teachers.
In fact, I plan to show off Kig at the conference. What I really need, is a simple tutorial or lesson that teachers can follow and see the benefits of using Kig (running in Ubuntu of course). If there is anyone who really understands Kig and would be willing to put something together I would greatly appreciate it. I have set up a wiki page to collect Lessons for this conference and future use as well. Please take a look and add to it in any way you can. I’m sure the lessons I do have could also use some tweaking so feel free to help improve them in any way you can.
I’m not sure if it can be made simple, but with a touch of python scripting I was able to get the distances between the points on a triangle:
I first created a triangle from three line segments. Then, I selected only the three segments (with ctrl), right clicked it and selected Start -> Python Script. The script I used was
def calc( segment1, segment2, segment3 ): distance12 = segment1.length() distance13 = segment2.length() distance23 = segment3.length() return (StringObject("Side 1: %s\nSide 2: %s\nSide 3: %s" % (distance12, distance13, distance23)))This created a little label which updated as I dragged around the points of the triangle.
astromme, thanks for the info. I’m not sure a Python script is going to make teachers overly excited to use this. Of course, there are other activities that don’t require scripting.
I did try this and I keep getting errors. The first was with respect to the lack of indents which I fixed but don’t get the next one at all.
“The Python Interpreter generated the following error output:
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
^
return (StringObject(?Side 1: %s\nSide 2: %s\nSide 3: %s? % (distance12, distance13, distance23)))
File “”, line 5″
Any ideas?
I think it might be because of the quote characters on the left side of the word ‘Side’ and to the right of ‘%s’. The double quote that you copied and pasted may have been a fancy non standard character. Easy to fix this, if this is indeed the problem. In your script, just delete the double quote and type in a new double quote.