A quick introduction is available at http://wiki.python.org/moin/EducationalSprint5MinuteIntroduction#preview

Rich Educational Sprint

Indonesia is one of the most poverty stricken countries in the world. Although Indonesia has exceedingly great natural wealth almost every successful Indonesian complains that the education system is poor. A parallel cause and effect also determines what happens to individuals.

One rich and one poor acquaintance both started as young machine language computer programmers. Because Grace M Hopper moved on to accept and promote better ways, she died a rear admiral. My poor friend was an exceptionally good machine language programmer. He was so happy earning $500 a day plus expenses that he never learned anything better than machine language. He hasn't been able to get a job for decades.

• Where do u wanna go? Would you like to make far reaching and lasting improvements to education? If you do, software is the best way to do it and Python is the ideal pervasive platform.

The ideas presented below range from teaching children, teaching poorly educated disaster victims, or teaching yourself and people like yourself. They range in complexity from teaching better reading and writing to teaching semi-automatated program generation. We cannot do everything we would like to do in a 4 day sprint. What we will do is be flexible to accomplish the most we can for the sprinters who tell us what they would like to have at the end depending upon the abilities of the other sprinters. Many things that were put down in the past as impossible have been accomplished by me and others. See the quote below from another linguist who would like to have some of the things this sprint has proposed and can be accomplished in 4 days.

 "Traditional written English is an unreliable representation of the spoken English. Instead of one symbol per sound, 

it has an average of over 14 different ways to write a single sound. This makes English writing system ambiguous and difficult to master. A dictionary key is over ten times less complex and can probably be learned ten times as quick. Instead of 3 years to achieve literacy, highly phonemic notations take only 3 months."

   Steven Bett, Ph.D. (Linguistics)

It is a fact, people learn an everyday language, reading, spelling, keyboarding, and computer programming only one time. Once you have learned any of these skills, the temptation is strong to defend the one you know as the best one and refuse to learn a variant. But the facts are that transferring that knowledge to do the same thing with a different language or environment is not nearly as hard as the initial learning endeavor.

You can become a "richer" person by developing "playful learning" software. Every person needs to learn how to read. There is only a 7% correspondence between traditional English spelling and spoken English. Spanish has an 85% correspondence between the phones and the written spelling. Reformed Logical English has over 95% correspondence between the sound system with spoken English. ENgliS has a 99% correspondence between the sound system of your English dialect and the ENgliS written system. Teaching traditional English is a 3 year plus process. The same literacy instruction for adults in languages with high phone to spelling correspondence takes 3 months. First graders can read and write at third grade level in one year using techniques developed by linguists who teach things we could program in this sprint. Experts are citing results showing that students with the kind of education we can produce to help the teachers and the students achieve a twelve year education in ten years, including the ability to spell the 7% English. In addition to producing software that will be useful to you and those whom you influence, you will be helping some of the poorest people in the world. The playful learning software you help develop for English will be adapted for the Nias and Indonesian languages.

Before the tsunami wiped out the Southern road and the succeeding earthquake destroyed 80% of the homes, 100% of the water lines, and the major livelihoods on Nias; Nias was the poorest island in Indonesia. One reason was because the Nias people had escaped persecution in China and their language is very different from the hundreds of other Indonesian languages including the Indonesian national language and even Chinese. Living on an island without any factories so that every unfinished product must be exported and every finished product must be imported incurs an unimaginable cost to the inhabitants who cannot speak to the people who live beyond the island. On Nias, the people who have been able to deal with the outside world are better off than the monolingual majority.

There is a lot of overlap between the linguistic principals of everyday languages and computer languages. One coach for this sprint is especially interested in multilingual exchanges between Java and Python. He is especially interested in expanding this sprint in this area if coaches able to program in both Java and Python will agree to co-coach this sprint.

Please make any proposals you want discussed and possibly implemented during this sprint.

We would be particularly interested in playful learning proposals.

Modify a LiveCD which already has what may be the most important keys to enable rapid learning of any foreign everyday language. During this sprint, we could develop playful learning software which would imitate what an expert linguist does to use these keys to learn one of the 50 plus languages on the LiveCd.

Develop software to instantly switch all input before the next switch to a different font and/or audio output. If font experts are available, develop dual fonts for two languages. Students could then playfully learn in several ways. They could hit a few keys and hear the corresponding sound segment. A teacher or a student could hit a key and the rest of the class who recognized the sound could then hit the same key. Keys could be hit to show English and another language or a learning key at the same time. A little more software and a key sequence could do auto-completion in dual languages. The possibilities are endless and easy to do if you have the easy to expand Python software as a foundation and you have experience teaching these things.

If you want to carve out an educational project to lead during these sprinting days please put your name and area of interest below and tell us more about yourself at http://us.pycon.org/TX2007/EducationalSprintCoaches.

Here are some more projects which need other coaches.

Translate some FLOSS Java into Python. A small project could be done by hand. But we could achieve much more with the help of a coach who also knows compiler-compilers.

Anyone even thinking about attending, please tell us your name, your greatest educational interests, and your interests or abilities in software and any comments you want to make. As an example:

• Name: Johnny Stovall
• Educational interests: Certified & experienced teacher and university professor interested in

• Software: Know most of the best CS fundamentals but need help with parts of Python.
• Other comments: See http://www.DrStovallFoundation.com for information on what computer technology

• Name:
• Educational interests:
• Software:
• Other comments:
• Name:
• Educational interests:
• Software:
• Other comments: