[Tugindia] LaTeX in schools

[LinuxLingam]

On Saturday 05 April 2003 09:43 am, Radhakrishnan CV wrote:
[snip]

am so excited to see the discussion on Tex for schools.

i am quite keen on it, as most of you know.

regarding M$office, sufficient to say if we can pitch openoffice instead of 
M$Office in schools, it creates less controversy, peole get to learn that 
'type' of office application, and all's well.

typography is a new and altogether different subject. to teach it to 
students, i realize we must start by giving them a taste of 'calligraphy'. 
and then, gradually, bring in typography concepts, and then show digital 
typography through TeX.

for the school education project free-ed.org, we realized openoffice and its 
XML output, even its native fileformats (which are anyways XML) are easily 
handled by the Content Management Systems and Content WOrkflow Engines that 
we are testing on the site.

doing chemistry, maths, physics, equations, etc, has no alternative except 
TeX.

so over time, the project would demand that students learn something about 
TeX. on researching i discovered for school students, KILE is an an excellent 
choice, and as they move up to senior school and undergraduate college, they 
could jump deeper into LaTex if they wish and hand-code their stuff.


>
> Later, when two children from this list successfully created open type
> fonts for Devanagri and released them under LGPL (the fonts attracted
> even Microsoft!), I thought how misconceived are the seniors in the
> list about the potentialities of our children!

the school children i discovered, are quite intelligent and an enthusiastic 
bunch who want to learn new sophisticated tools. they need something 
challenging for their minds. hopefully, more things will be done soon for 
furthering font development as well in schools soon. stay tuned.

:-)
LL