Module Creation for Android Apps

Hi All,

Have there been any conversations around creating a module to house Educational Offline Compatible Android Apps? Data can be expensive or hard to get in some contexts, and if people were able to download curated educational apps from RACHEL directly onto their wifi connected phones they might be able to continue the learning process once they go home. I’m sure you would need to get the proper permissions from the developers, but apps produced by groups like http://www.starfall.com/ strike me as something that might be really useful examples. Many of these apps are already being shared peer to peer through methods like the Xender App.

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Great question! We have been talking about this a lot lately, as the folks at Curious Learning literacy apps are interested in getting their Android apps on RACHEL. We’re still working on the details, as we want to find the most user-friendly way possible, but hopefully we’ll have a solution sometime in the next month or two. In the meantime, if anyone has suggestions for more open-source educational apps they’d like to see on RACHEL, please share them here!

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Great to hear!

I work in Sierra Leone. The types of apps I would be most passionate about seeing would be apps focused on building basic numeracy and literacy skills among primary level students and or adults who haven’t been to school bearing in mind that its primarily an ESL crowd, and then anything that can help students successfully prepare for their WAEC exams at the end of primary school, the end of junior secondary school, and the end of senior secondary school. The WAEC exams are administered in five West African countries Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the Gambia and so resources geared at this crowd have potential for quite the reach. Perhaps the Android App module once its designed could also include a function for device administrators to upload their own additional apps that maybe they’ve built or found access to.

This particular app contains the entire syllabus for material covered after senior secondary school. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.josephjawahkebbie.wasscesyllabus&hl=en This app focuses on Biology & borrows questions from the WAEC exams. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.toscanyacademy.completebiology&hl=en

I’ll keep my eyes open for any additional resources, and would love to hear what others have found to be helpful. On a different, but related note the starfall apps I mentioned in my last post I now realize also have an online website version of their learning activities. Perhaps their material could also form its own future offline RACHEL module separate from the downloadable android learning apps?

I’ll be watching this space with interest!

Kind Regards,

I have been looking for the module from Bernard Poole with tutorials for Office Suite Software. He is the person that told me about Rachel and said his software was included, but I have not been able to find it.

I have installed 7 Rasberry Pi Servers in schools of the Kasama Primary School District in Zambia. We are running this as a trial to see how the teachers will use them in class, get feedback of software loaded, etc. First comments have been good.

This is a much needed educational tool.

Hi did this ever happen? If not could I help make it happen somehow?

In addition to ‘feed the monster’ from Curious learning

Sugarizer

10000 sentences

I had a go at creating a basic module with a few educational and comms FOSS apps in it.

Does it look right? Could I get it added to the official repo?

It’s 359.9 MB

To install on a pi
ssh pi@10.10.10.10
<password (rachel)>
sudo su
<password (rachel)>
cd /var/www/modules
wget https://archive.org/download/en-AndroidApps/en-AndroidApps.zip
unzip en-AndroidApps.zip

The apps are:

  • Learn about installing apps on Android
  • Feed the Monster - Improve your reading game
  • Sugarizer - Range of education apps
  • Gcompris- Educational games
  • Primary - Maths & English
  • 10,000 sentences - Improve your English
  • Manyverse - Offgrid social network
  • Briar - Offgrid messaging
  • Httrack - Website copier
  • Share via http - Share content over wifi
  • Termux - learn programming
  • Android

    Great so this seems to work (in a very barebones way)

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    @sam_uk, thanks for putting this together! Is this hosted somewhere so that I could also use it?

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    Hi It’s up on internet archive https://archive.org/download/en-AndroidApps/en-AndroidApps.zip

    Install instructions are in post above.

    Easy to add .apk files and links to it, but make sure they are GPL/ you have consent to distribute.

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    Sugarizer 1.2 for Android is now available

    https://groups.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/unleashkids/fCod2NHrQZ4/rk24IW52BAAJ

    I don’t have time right now to update the package, but if anyone else fancied having a go it’s very easy.

    1. Download zip
    2. remove old sugarizer.apk
    3. insert new sugarizer.apk
    4. Zip it up again
    5. Upload it to Archive.org
    6. Share the link here.
    1 Like

    So a year on I updated this package to have the latest versions of the apps. It can be found here

    @jeremy would you be interested in including this as a module that can be installed from within Rachel?

    I’m a newbie, can anyone guide me to create a Module for an Android app?

    The Android version of RACHEL is not being maintained or supported. I believe it was created as part of a content. If you’d like instructions for creating RACHEL modules in general, you can check out GitHub - worldpossible/module-template: A template for putting together RACHEL modules

    James