About NTU Ventures

NTU Ventures is a commercial arm of NTU. It not only financially invests in start-up businesses but also provide several services to entrepreneurs such as:

• Consulting
• Incubation support
• Industry partnership
• In-campus infrastructure

Like how the progress of this project is monitored by Mr Pillay via this blog, NTU Ventures uses Sys-Workflow for its panelists to monitor and approve start-up projects.

Finalized Idea: Sys-Workflow

We will be using Scribus or any other possible LibreOffice tools to design and write an instruction manual for the administrator of a recently developed private system for NTU Ventures.  The system was designed and published using WordPress, an Open Source blog tool. It can be found under the url http://www.sys-workflow.com though access to the system requires a username and password.

List of Free Open Source Tools We Could Use

Here are a few open source tools introduced during meeting 3:

1. Libre Office: Impress for final presentation
2. DIA: Diagramming software
3. Scribus: Graphics design
4. GIMP: Image editing tool

The Idea

The team discussed on what we should do for the open source project and we came up with the following options:

1) Modified instruction manual for open source animation software for children to understand
   
    Examples of 2D animation software we considered:
    - KTooN: Software for creating simple animations in 5 steps
    - Tux Paint: Animation software designed for young children
   
    Examples of 3D animation software we considered:
    - Blender
    - Art of Illusion

However, 3D design is a skill which require a lot of time to learn. It will require a much longer instruction manual as compared to 2D design software and children are less likely to have the patience to get through with it.

Tux Paint is an ideal software for children as it is designed for that purpose. It's tutorial is in the readme file which consists of a long page of text with few diagrams. Children are unlikely to have the patience read the whole tutorial, much less even open the readme file. What we can do is to recreate the tutorial with a more graphical approach (eg. using comic strip format or a video tutorial), that the developer can add to his program such that the tutorial will appearon the user interface at first launch after installation.

2) Create a Wiki for lower primary students
     - Includes thoroughly simplified pages for subjects (Math/Science/ etc.)
Most wiki pages contain an over-explanation that are too complicated for children to understand.