Endless Ideas

Project Gutenburg's Greatest Books of the World is a module in the RACHEL application that provides hundreds of classic books to read from such as: The Count of Monte Cristo, Pride and Prejudice, and even the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to name a few. Students could be assigned to read the books over a span of time and then meet and share not only what they read but also what they identified with, things they noticed were different versus now, or even how the Characters grew or changed throughout the chapter or book itself.

TED Talks are a great resource for finding easy to understand talks about some pretty complex topics. Talks could be assigned as standalone assignments or even used to accent other assignments. After watching a video, youth can report what they knew before the video and then compare it to what they learned from watching the video.

The Virtual School Application (Also known as Khan Academy (KA) Lite) allows students to create profiles within the application that track their progress while they watch videos and complete assignments via a point system. Assigning a number of points the youth must earn in a certain topic would be a great way for youth to begin digging into some of the many resources that KA Lite provides with easy-to-follow video guided lessons. Because of the profile progress tracking feature, it would also be easy for youth to pick up where they left off the next time they explore that particular topic.

Endless OS comes preloaded with a bunch of Encyclopedia-like applications with topics that range from Soccer to Dinosaurs. Each of these applications are chock full of information pertaining to their respective topics and could very well be used in creating an assignment where a youth has to cover a specific subject within that topic using the information provided by the application. Say the topic of the week is Mythology, a number of youth could be assigned a different section each from that topic (such as Greek, Native American, Asian, Central American, Egyptian, etc.) and work on some form of expressive medium (speech, poster board, acting skit, etc.) that they would share at the end of the week.

Most youth now-a-day have at least some experience with the popular game Minecraft, Minetest is a Minecraft-like application on the Endless OS that could be used to create a competition or assignment for the students to exercise their creativity and show off something they've built be it a massive mansion that their character lives in, a complex roller-coaster ride, or even a petting zoo comprised of all the most dangerous creatures in the game.

My Budget is an application that provides not only instructions on creating and maintaining a budget, but also spreadsheet templates that can be used to understand the process of budgeting. These templates can then be cleared of all their example data and used to track the student's actual budget. Taking it a step further, a program or assignment can be created where the youth are assigned a certain amount of imaginary money which they must keep track of and "spend" on things throughout the week such as watching TV, making phone calls, play games, or really anything else. At the end of the week they can evaluate how well they budgeted their week and gain real experience in understanding limitations and impulse control.

Journaling is not a new idea, but in the recent years has become less and less common in younger populations. Assigning a certain word count per day that the youth must journal their thoughts, feelings, ideas, or anything else could not only help them develop their writing skills, but also express themselves in a private medium that they otherwise wouldn't have thought of. The Libre Office Document Writer application is an ideal tool to accomplish this task.

Every year a creative event known as NaNoWriMo takes place throughout the entire month of November, the only goal? Write 50,000 words in the 30 days that make up the month of November. The Quality of the writing is the least important part, instead the Quantity of writing is what's most important. A story is not considered a novel until it has 50,000 words in it and NaNoWriMo provides a small window for writers to put ideas down as quickly as they come in a mess of grammatical errors and run on sentences. NaNoWriMo encourages writers and even non-writers to pick up the pen (or Libre Writer in this case) and just start writing as much as they can, as quickly as they can. It is an intense challenge, but the only obstacle between the writer and the 50,000 word goal is the writer themselves. It is an amazing creative outlet and could easily lead to youth discovering a hobby in writing and there are few experiences more rewarding than finally reaching that 50,000th word before midnight, November 30th. For more information, check out the official NaNoWriMo website.

One of the most basic programs that programmers first create is called the "Hello World" program. With only a couple lines of code you can make a program that prints "Hello World" to the screen. This may not seem very impressive but has been the start of the journey towards learning to code that many people have taken. Using the resources on Endless OS (Programming, HTML Tutorials, and even the Web Design lesson in the OLPC Education Package in RACHEL) youth can learn to program web application using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, a process that is not only very creative, but would create an opportunity for students to learn skills that could be used in the work force when they rejoin society. The best application to use for writing code on the Securebook would be either Gedit or Brackets.

Resume is an application on Endless OS that provides both a guide to writing a resume and templates with example data already put in that youth can use to create their own resume. These can then be used to "apply" for a job with the teacher or facilitator who would then mock an interview with the youth to help them gain experience for job searching and representing themselves to potential employers.

LMMS is a music production application. It allows for the creation of loops, synthesizing and mixing sounds, arranging samples, having fun with your MIDI-keyboard and much more... Using this tool, Students would be able to create beats or even entire musical tracks. A good project to explore some of this tool's features would be to have the youth create a thirty second to one minute musical track, either stand alone or something for them to sing/rap to. For detailed instructions on using this application, download this PDF.

Blender is an open source 3D creation suite, it supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline - modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, composition, motion tracking, and video editing. With such a powerful tool and some time Students could create really anything! Before creating Blender projects though, we recommend taking a look at the Blender User Manual which can be downloaded at this link. The file that is downloaded is a zip file of an offline website, to view the manual simply unzip the file and then open the "index" file in your web browser.