Description

The 21st edition of LUDOVIA will be held in Ax-Les-Thermes in the Ariégeoises Pyrénées from the 26th to the 29th of August.

This event attract teachers and promotes new practices and educational initiatives with students, using digital technology and shares them with the educational community.

Goals

• Encourage teachers, headmasters, school boards, town halls to adopt KDE software into classrooms
• Find contributors, testers, feedback to our current educational software, including software not specifically educations, but than can be used for educational purposes, such as LabPlot, Krita, Kdenlive, etc.
• Find opportunities for funding and support from public institutions
• Meet people from French ministry of education to encourage them to recommend and endorse KDE software to teachers, boards, schools, etc., and also see what joint projects we can work on.

Selling Points

• Software of excellent quality
• No license payments, can be shared
• Environmentally friendly and cost effective, as it can run on low end and old hardware

HOWTO

• @echarruau will be running a 90 minute workshop/demo showing how to use GCompris in the classroom
• We have asked for a booth to showcase KDE educational and semi-educational software

Important Dates

• Jan. 25 - 10 Mar.: validation of services and early booking options (price reduction)
• 15 Jul.: last registrations
• 26 Aug.: Event starts
• 29 Aug.: Even ends

TODOs

Talk

Booth

• Obtain booth
  • Write and send email to organisers introducing KDE and requesting booth
  • Request accepted - We will be sharing 9 m2with the SCOllectiv collective. Contact: association@scollectif.fr
• Staff booth
  • @paulb
  • @echarruau
  • ...
• Source materials
  • Banner
  • Stickers
  • QR sheets
  • Devices
    • 2 computers running educational software
    • Android tablet running GCompris

Budget

Costs

Please read this:

Donations

TOTAL: -

Post Mortem

Emmanuel (@echarruau)

• In France there are real primary teachers that are specialised in helping primary teachers to use computing. They are called ERUN
  
  Ludovia is the place where they come to get some new info for their worka nd talk to other ERUN. GCompris is really well known under these people as they install it everywhere, espeacially in the countryside when computers are old.

• I watched a conference during the second day about creating communs within teachers, and helping educational free project to become strong. This talk was given by Alexis Kauffmann. Reading the following page (to be translated)

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_Kauffmann let understand why it was so important to go there once we were invited. He explained how the goal of national education is to live his numerical life on two legs, a commercial one and a open source one.

• When we meet he took a long time to talk about GCompris and wants to understand its roadmap.

• He will plan a video call in the first days of Septembre to se how he can help us as he sees GCompris as an important project that needs to be robust.

• Ludovia also allowed to meet the Primtux development team. Primtux is a distribution based on Linux Mint aimed to school. It is the official National Education distribution. Looking at the following video will show you how important. GCompris is for this distribution. https://primtux.fr/

• Johnny made an important change on GCompris architecture last winter that allows to starts the activities separately. It allows now in Primtux to start the activities individually from the main menu. The changes have been done very quickly by Johnny and it is very appreciated from the Primtux team.

Paul ( @paulb )

Motivation

Decades of experience has shown us that getting adults to migrate from an operating system or a set of applications they have been using all of their lives since childhood is extremely hard.

Introducing Free Software into schools gives people a fighting chance of not developing a dependency exclusively on proprietary products from unscrupulous, abusive and predatory tech giants.

The way in is through talking and running demos for teachers, education boards and policy makes in official institutions (such as ministries of education) and answering their questions.

Ludovia allows us to meet all three in one place, and the pre-event work carried out by Emmanuel allowed us to cover the whole gamut during our stay.

Goals

• Introduce KDE software to the French educational system through primary and secondary teachers.
• Seek the backing of the French Ministry of Education.
• Solidify the GCompris's place in PrimTux, the most used educational distro in French schools.
• Work PrimTux creators so they would consider migrating from their current DE (Mate) to Plasma.

What we did

• We set up a booth. This served as a meeting and continuous demo point for attendees wishing to learn about GCompris, Plasma and other KDE software products, as well as about KDE (as a community and global project) itself.
• We met with the people we wanted to talk to, including but not limited to, Alexis Kauffmann, open education and digital citizenship project manager from the Ministry of Educations; Thierry Muñoz and other of the PrimTux project; members of COOP Maths, a collective of mathematics teachers; regional free software collectives and associations; and more.
• Emmanuel prepared and delivered a talk on GCOmpris, probably the activity we misjudged, as explained below.

What happened

Ludovia was 3 days this year.

We set up our booth in the Scollectif area, a collective who kindly got as a table and space to display our wares.

We had two computers running GCompris (and Plasma and other KDE software), and and Android tablet and an Android phone. Proceedings did not start until 15:00, and we ran demos, took questions and chatted to attendees.

Most new and used GCompris, albeit often older versions. A common complaint is that their software was not updated often enough. This did not restrict itself to their educational software, but also to the operating systems: many teachers told us how their schools were using old devices (not a problem for KDE software) running old version of proprietary OSes (a problem), and that many sysadmins could not update to newer version fo Windows and did not want to risk a migration. In other cases the schools did not have a sysadmin at all, and it was up to the teachers to keep their IT infrastructure running.

Despite the fact most teachers were aware of what Free Software was and that it could help them, they were trapped or by the lack of willingness of their technical staff to carry out a migration (and who could blame them), or directly by a lack of technical staff.

Case in point was Sophie, an extroverted and funny teacher from Montpellier. When I asked her what OS they were using she jokingly responded with "Windows 95" and then quickly: "No, really Windows 2000" and laughed at my horrified face.

I asked who was in charge of the computers and she smilingly pointed to herself. "Are you a trained IT professional?" I enquired. Again the laugh and a very definite "Non!". Turns out if you teach maths to secondary kids, you are expected to be an IT expert too.

Outside of teachers, the place was crawling with delegates French FOSS associations looking to network. Scollectif is a group integrated by several educational associations wit and interest in educational technologies. They were the ones that helped us obtain a place in the event, and provided us with space for a booth. We are grateful to the collective's members, particularly Isabelleand Élodie. We will be seeking their help in future editions and other events.

• Email Isabelle and Elodie thanking them for their help
• Keep channel open for future joint activities

We also met with Myriam from API: Action of Public Interest and Pascal from Montpel'libre, two assciations working to popularise FLOSS in the sout of France. They formally invited KDE to participate in their joint event Rencontres Amicales Francophones du Logiciel Libre in 2025.

• Follow up with Myriam and Pascal to see if we can get a French-speaking community member to go and represent KDE

COOPMaths is an association of maths teachers working on developing GPLed exercises and activities for pupils. Although most of their activities are web-based, they were interested in working with KDE to adapt their activities to GCompris.

• Check with Emmanuel to see how we can work with COOPMaths and expand GCompris with their activities

Finally, PrimTux is a Linux distro/collective for French schools. It comes with many FLOSS educational packages, including GCompris, but our aim here is to work with them to include more KDE software and maybe convince them to migrate from the Mate desktop to Plasma, as the Lliurec folks in Valencia did.

• Follow up with Thierry Muñoz from PrimTux and update him with KDE stuff

Finally, not exactly an association, but we met up with Alexis Kauffmann of FRAMASoft fame and current project manager for open education and digital diversity of France's Ministry of Education. He wanted to know what they could do for us (help us get more of our software into schools, somehow support our efforts) and aske us to provide him with a list of products we think would be appropriate to deploy in french schools.

• Figure the above out and send to Alexis

Lesson Learned

• GCompris seems to be so well-known that it doesn't seem to need a talk. I would argue that its new features (server module, new activities, or whatever they ar in 2026) would though.
• Although the main star, there is more to show at Ludovia than GCompris. Next time we must be ready to demo Plasma and a bunch of other software (educational and semi-educational)
• Although I think there may be a point where it is not necessary, I would advise attending Ludovia a couple of times more and consolidate our position as providers of FLOSS products for the French schools and lycees.

TL;DR

Ludovia is an excellent event where we can showcase our software to a receptive and enthusiastic audience.

This can help us shape our educational software to adapt it to the real world situations.

Also a great place to find contributors or sister projects we can work and coordinate with.

...