[Edu-sig] Children's Internet Gateway Project

[a.najarian at att.net]

Dear Everyone,

I am writing to introduce you to the Children's Internet Gateway Project 
(http://www.opensourcearmenia.com/gateway).   Our goal is to create a Web 
portal for kids by using open-source tools.  A number of portals for kids 
exist out there.  But we want something 
a) that is open-source; 
b) that kids can participate in making; 
c) that will be available in Armenian, too (and yes, most of us are 
Armenians :)).

We'd like that portal to be a fun place, and one of the things we're hoping 
to accomplish is to build a game-making environment, using Python.  Does 
anybody know if there are efforts in that direction (i.e. Python game-making 
software)?

We are using Plone (and Zope, and Python) to build the portal.  We have 
produced (and are continuing work on) an Armenian localization for Plone 
(test site at http://spi.zoper.com/tziatzan) as a part of this effort.  

Another thing we're doing is making a prototypical school intranet (for 
schools in Armenia, again) -- and lobbying with the various schools/NGOs/the 
government  (not all schools have computers, let alone a computer network) to 
try these out.  If anyone has recommendations about nice educational intranet 
portals, we'd love to hear them.

This project received some funding from the Open Source Armenia, and is 
staffed by volunteer effort.  There are kids and adults collaborating on this 
(online); one project team is located in the small town of Spitak, Armenia 
(http://www.spitux.org), and then there are some people in the capital of 
Armenia, and finally, a few of us here in Boston.

We'd be happy to hear from you -- if you'd like to help us out with any 
comments or suggestions, or point us to your favorite kids' sites, or 
features, or anything, really.  Write to us, or visit our forum at: 
http://www.opensourcearmenia.com/Projects/gateway/forum

Best regards,

--
Anoush Najarian

The SpiTux Project:
http://www.spitux.org
2003 LinuxFund.org Grant
Children's Internet Gateway Project
http://opensourcearmenia.com/Projects/gateway
Plone Armenian l10n
http://spi.zoper.com/tziatzan
TuxType Armenian Theme
http://opensourcearmenia.com/Projects/Tuxtype

Email: a.najarian at att.net
URL: 
http://www.math.uiuc.edu/~najarian