Tutorius is an open source project developed by nine computer engineering students at Sherbrooke University in Canada. Our project is based on the Sugar platform with the simple goal of making education easier and more accessible to teachers and children around the world and also of improving education quality in general.
The Sugar platform on which Tutorius is based is already installed on more than 400,000 laptops around the world, mainly because of its association with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. Even though Sugar isn’t the official operating system running on the XO (OLPC laptop) anymore, it is now included with most Linux distributions, remains widely used and is an interesting educational platform.
Just to give a brief explanation of what Sugar is, it target children from 6 to 12 years old and describe itself as follows:
The learning engine for every child: Sugar provides a simple yet powerful means of engaging young children in the world of learning that is opened up by computers and the Internet. With Sugar, even the youngest learner will quickly become proficient in using the computer as a tool to engage in authentic problem-solving. Sugar promotes sharing, collaborative learning, and reflection, developing skills that help them in all aspects of life
Even though Sugar already made a huge step in making learning easier and more accessible to young children, some important improvements can still be made. Discovery, sharing and collaboration are at the core of the Sugar platform, but there is a need to better structure the way students are going to explore and learn. This is what Tutorius is all about: providing an extra layer on top of the existing learning platform to guide the students and structure the way they are going to learn using it. The goal is definitively not to limit the children in their exploration and learning, it is to make it easier for them to do so by giving them the right tools and support.
Because teachers are at the core of education, Tutorius give a lot of importance to them. That is because even if we make learning easier and more interesting for children, it also has to be easy and interesting for teachers to use Sugar and promote what they are doing with it. Tutorius will be able to make learning easier, more interesting and accessible to children and also provide the necessary tools to teachers by focusing on the following three aspects: building an interactive tutor, activities editor and a website.
Interactive tutor
As one of our goal is to guide the student through different type of learning activities, we plan to add a layer on top of Sugar to provide additional interaction between the system and the student. This could take the form of info bubble, video, audio, control highlighting, step-by-step guides, suggestions, examples, etc.
The tutor will offer more than static interaction, we plan to integrate an evaluation functionality so that it is possible to follow students’ progression and also evaluate them. Evaluation won’t attribute a grade to the students because as the goal is to make it more interesting for students to learn using a computer, we’d like the evaluation system to work more like a game. By that we mean that a successfully completed activity could unlock another activity for example and this way, students aren’t judged by a grade or by how well they did. By making it look more like a game with things such as goals to achieve and activities to unlock, we hope to keep students motivated and interested.
Tutorius will keep every good aspect of Sugar like discovery and sharing, but will simply add an extra layer of interaction with students to guide them, trigger interest in what they are doing and keep them motivated.
Activities editor
Teachers are obviously at the core of education and for this reason, we plan to build an easy tutorial builder with a simple graphical user interface for teachers to easily create tutorials existing for Sugar activities. This tutorial editor should allow teachers to easily create tutorials without any programming or technical knowledge of the Sugar platform. It should provide them all the necessary tools to create a complete tutorial, from adding graphical elements to configuring the activity and adding validation rules. It is an important part of the Tutorius project simply because we think that by providing all the necessary tools to teachers to create educational material for Sugar easily, they will be more interested in creating material and promoting the use of the platform.
Community website
As we just stated, part of our vision is that by making it easier for everyone using the platform to share educational material, it will be a lot more interesting and motivating for people to use it. To fulfill this goal, creating a website that will allow everyone to share activities and educational material is at the core of our vision. The website should allow people to submit activities, rate them, download them, create a personal page/channel, subscribe to people’s channels and discuss. The full scope of the website is still to be determined, but the objective is to create a community where sharing material is easy.
Get in touch with us
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