A kiosk application for educational purposes in subjects not involving programming consists of tools for viewing texts, animations, images, a calculator a plotter and an interface do upload pictures taken from your handwritten assignments. There is also a chat platform for group chats and individual talking. The whole plattform uses TCP/IP as its only communication protocol avoiding existing RFC standards. The GUI is similar to a web site but looks more like a desktop with windows where all tools like calculator, chat clients, upload tools are represented by floating windows. Nothing more and nothing less. The purpose of this application is not teaching the students how to realize such a platform but the subjects they need to pass their exams at university. There is no benefit for the students to learn how to realize such a platform and thats also not the goal of this project.

My Freebsd version has now 800 MB. A great amount of this size is caused by hand written sample solution scans for past exams provided as 300dpi images (png or ppm). Most of my notes are handwritten cause this way to provide solutions for exam questions is faster and simpler. Some of the teachings are provided as ogg vorbis files.

The system part regarding Freebsd and X11 can be reduced by using plan9 dramatically. My own software has a few MB. In the plan9 distribution I will use a new image format based on horizontal scanlines using 256 colors. This has an acceptable quality is faster to render and the size of the image files will shrink to about 25%.

800 MB aren't only the sources they include the base course material. The application has to make this material visible, usable and allow students to connect to deliver their assignments ask questions get back hand written notes and to exchange information with others using this closed network.