 Thank you, everyone. So my name is Rajneel. I am currently working with the Moodle Academy team as a developer educator. So before I continue with my presentation, just if you could show me with a raise of your hands how many of you are educators, teachers, in your normal role? Well, I think all of us are teachers, right, by nature. But as a formal role, how many of you are actually a teacher educator? And how many of you are developers? You write code. You build things. OK, that's good. So we've got a fairly even mix of people in the audience. So my role is basically, yeah, I'm working part-time developer writing code. And the other half of my work deals with creating developer courses. So with the Moodle Academy, I am currently in charge of creating short courses for new developers who are trying to learn about Moodle, how to write plugins, how to do upgrades, how to learn about different concepts within Moodle. And in my previous role, before joining Moodle Academy, I was working at the University of the South Pacific in the tiny islands of Fiji. So you don't really see it on the map, but this is where Fiji is. So University of the South Pacific is basically a small university that is owned by 12 other Pacific island countries, right? And this blue area here, there are about 14 or 15 different countries. And of them, 12 of them form the University of the South Pacific. So the presentation before, and we've seen a few more during the Moodle Mood, is that they're talking about providing access. And that is why we love the Moodle project, is that it enables us to access, enables us to connect to all the other different islands. So yeah, I'm really happy to be part of the Moodle team and very happy to be here and be able to present. My talk today, I'm going to talk about customizing Moodle. And in particular, working with Moodle for six, seven-year-old kids. Moodle itself is highly customizable. There's so many things that you can do with Moodle. It has a very large target audience. So if you're new to Moodle, it becomes very difficult to understand which features to use, because you just get overwhelmed with so many options. And then there are a large community. There are so many plugins. There are so many customizations. It's open source, so anybody can do any customizations or any changes that you want. But where do you start? Then again, you've got so many options. So in my presentation today, I'll talk about some of the things that you can use, which are just part of Go. You don't need any customizations, any hacks, any developer experience. You can just use core features. And then there's a lot of great plugins available in the community, which we can leverage. And for the purpose of this presentation, I'm going to show you how or at least discuss how I worked on porting the changes from Moodle 3.4 to Moodle 4. Moodle 4 itself presented a new interface, a new navigation, a new way of imagining how Moodle should be and how to navigate. And then a lot of our users are still using Moodle 3, Moodle 3.9 and 3.11. So many people are still worried about the new change, the new interface. How do I move over from Moodle 3 to Moodle 4? So I tried that challenge, how difficult it would be. So if you have your existing system that is running on Moodle 3, how difficult would it be to Meno port all those changes to Moodle 4? And then I started with Moodle 3.4. So the background of what I did, so as part of my 2018 master's research, I was working, my research was how we can use technology with year one students. So we worked with three primary schools in Fiji, first year students, and the technology that we used at that time was Moodle 3.4. That was the recent vision of Moodle. Students had Android tablets, 10-inch Android tablets. And basically, they connected to a Wi-Fi, a controlled network so that they could access the Moodle system. The target audience for that research were six to seven year old students. And in Fiji, they were in the first year of the formal education primary school. None of them had ever used Moodle before. Some of the students might have used tablet devices, mobile devices, probably. But majority, we assume, have never used a device before. And because they were just starting school, so they were just beginning to read. So they had very limited vocabulary. Many of them could just recognize alphabets and numbers. They were just starting to read. So we had a lot of choices to make. So we are now going to present to them Moodle. How can we make Moodle simple, right? So that was the main question. And the choices that we had to make. How do we make Moodle simple so that it's simple to use, simple to understand, simple to comprehend, right? And one of the things that we started with was to remove as many distractions as possible. Because the target audience, the audience were kids. Kids like colorful things. So we need to make Moodle colorful. They were going to use a tablet device, a mobile device. So it has to be the design, the interface has to be optimized for the touch interface so that you can navigate with tiny fingers. And then again, just getting used to how to use these devices. So we had to think about all those things. None of them would have ever used a website before. So we were still going to use the web-based interface of Moodle, right? So tried to do some customizations with the theme so that it feels more like an app. So the setup for the year one project was the main component was the theme. And if you start with Moodle, right, just the basic theme feels fairly plain, very basic. And a lot of people complain that Moodle looks boring. But if you just work on a theme, you can do quite a bit of things with just the theme. And make Moodle do so many things. We only used two modules, two plugins in Moodle, the book tool, and the quiz. Because again, these are new students, right? They have not used Moodle before. So just stick with very simple things so that they can understand this is what a book is, this is what I need to do, and all the other activities just followed a similar pattern. Likewise with the quiz, again, so you have a quiz, but then you have so many different question types. So for this particular work, we only used two types of question types, the multiple choice question types, because you could easily present three or four different options, and they could easily click on it, or drag and drop. So yeah, and then I'll show you some examples. The other thing that you can do with Moodle, the basic default Moodle setup comes with the topics course format. For this, right, you can still make a lot of changes by using a different course format. For the purpose of this one, there was one existing plugin, the buttons course format. It's available on the Moodle plugins directory. And I'll show an example in the next slide. And explain the reason why we chose that. So the buttons course format, the stash plugin, it's a block which allows you to add a little bit of gamification, the short codes filter that is required to use the stash plugin. And then the other thing that you could do is to customize the language string. You could use the existing language pack that is there and do certain language string customizations to suit your audience, to suit your organization. Or you could also install additional language packs. And there were some core code hacks in the Moodle 3.4 version that we did. So again, the main component was the theme, was to remove as many unwanted elements as possible, to remove the destruction, to make it more colorful, to design the interface, to cater for the touch interface, basically increasing the type areas and add animation, because kids like animation. So I started with that Moodle 3.4 set up that I had. And how do you make the move to Moodle 4? The first thing was to update the course format. Because in Moodle 4, they have now changed the course format structure. So with the old course format, you could still use it. It is still compatible, but it will give you deprecation errors. So the first thing was to migrate the course format. So and there's already existing documentation on how to do that. And luckily, there was somebody who had already started this work in the community. So I just used that as the starting point. And that's, again, the great thing about the Moodle project being open source. Somebody can start something, and then others can take it further. So I started with the original buttons course format. And then somebody did the first stage of customizing it, migrating it to Moodle 4. And then I used it for this project. The stash plugin was already updated and is compatible with Moodle 4. So that was already done. So no major work required there. Same thing. The short codes filter compatible with Moodle 4. No major work there. Then update the theme, because, again, the theme layout, the interface had changed. So this is what required a little bit of work and then some language customizations. So as part of Moodle 4, I'm starting at least working on a theme called coconut. I'm from the Pacific. Red coconut represents a large part of our life. So the theme would be called a coconut. It is using Boost as a parent theme. And basically what it does is that it takes the Moodle 4 theme structure, but adds additional components for making Moodle colorful, different layouts that we are going to use within the course. The animations, basically CSS classes, libraries, right, to add animations, structures, color palettes. And then overwrite some of the existing renderers that we have within Moodle and some of the templates. So basically, again, creating a theme wasn't too much difficult. Just leverage the parent theme of Moodle 4. We had a discussion with the other devs, I think, yesterday. Many people were, again, complaining that moving from a Moodle 3 theme to Moodle 4 upgrading is a lot of work, because so many things break. And I think my suggestion would be, don't try to upgrade. Start with a Moodle 4 Boost parent theme, and then add the changes that you want into the new theme. And then you will see some of the things that you had before you might not need it. A lot of things would not be broken, right? So you will be just using a structure that works, and then add in your other components. So like I said, so you have a theme. You are adding additional structures, additional styles. And then you can leverage them in your content. So basically, there are already classes defined, the color palette defined. And then you can have a template that you can use to build your content. So a lot of people, what they also do is that they try to add all the styles, all the content together, and then it becomes a lot of difficult, a bit difficult as you are creating content, because now you need to focus on the content, and then also on the styles. And then sometimes things break, or it is not consistent across different pages. So the course format here you can see was the button's course format. Basically, it presents each section with a different number. And then because they are first year students, year one students, so they understand or they can identify what numbers are. So just simple buttons to navigate between the different sections. You can see a model 3.4 version and then a model 4 version. So it looks fairly similar. I tried to just keep it similar so that we can see the similarities. And then an example of the book. In the 3.4 version, there's a GIF animation where you can see how it would be. This is just a screenshot. That's why you do not see any animation. But basically all the structure, all the things that we added in the theme, that's how it basically looks. So everything there is just plain CSS and HTML. There's no JavaScript. There's no nothing. And again, because we need to focus on things being lightweight, internet access is limited. The devices that they would be using is not that powerful. We need to think about battery life. So we try to make the platform as lightweight as possible. And those were the reasons why we try to just make use of basic HTML and CSS as well. This is an example of a quiz. And this is a drag and drop question type. Basically the standard drag and drop question that we have. Just with the basic styles that we defined, the structure, the color, the animation. And that is how basically it now looks. And I'll give another example to see the difference. I think later in the slides. So another example of the quiz. You don't see it in the screenshot here, but right this clock, you can see the hands animating. So the second hand would try to go around every second. So it would keep on ticking. So a tiny bit of animation just to add a little bit of character, a little bit of life into the content. So an example of the drag and drop question, right? So the box, the screenshot there, is just the default drag and drop question type. So you just add your plain text, that is how it looks. Just with simple, I think, three or four CSS rules, this is how it looks. Again, because the audience arcades, so we increase the box, the placeholders, we add different rules to differentiate between which is the objects that they need to drop and which are the placeholders, the drag points and the drop points. So the plan for the future, initially it started as a research project. But I think the long-term plan now is that to get in contact with as much people as possible, get more feedback, release the theme in the plugins database so that more people can use it. The focus is on the app. Initially, we started with the web-based version, but offline access is important, again, because of connectivity issues. So we want to see how we can now add a lot of those customizations into the app so that we can leverage the offline access of the app. Yeah, so thank you very much. That's my presentation. Thank you very much, Rajneel. It looks great what you've done for young children. I know Moodle made for kids is one of those things that a lot of folks ask us about, and you've done a wonderful job. We have time for questions. Does anybody have a question for Rajneel? Thank you. Thank you very much. My name is Maxwell Fundy. I'm from Kenya, and part of the reason why I actually attended this session is because I was really excited to see Moodle being used for children. In our context, fairly recently, like two months ago, we had this work with children which are similar children, 6, 7, 8 children, which are PP1, PP2, and it was mostly about them watching videos, and we had to think very deep about what we need to use, whether the app or whether to stick with the web version. And we decided to have the app because of the offline capabilities, because of our context as well. And some of the questions I have for you from your work is what informed you not to customize the app, for example, and decided to go straight into web? Because I thought because of the capabilities of the app, it would have been one of the options. Then in terms of infrastructure that you had, for us, we are using Raspberry Pi, that's an wireless network that you can download content, and I wanted to understand more about what infrastructure you've got. Are you using internet, or how does that look like? And then finally, what was your experience with children interacting with devices for the first time? Was it hard for them to interact with devices, then harder to get to Moodle? Or how did that process look like for you? Because, yeah, I see a lot of similarities on this, and I can't wait for when Coconut is officially released out there so that we can also use it. Yeah. Yeah, thank you very much. So the reason why I started with the web-based version right because it was easier. I was the learning system developer, and using the web-based, basically, my role was customizing or maintaining the university Moodle site. So I had like eight, 10 years of experience at that time, just working on the PHP application. So it just was convenient to me at that time. And I think at that time, the app was not as mature in terms of offline support. And then the other thing is that, like I mentioned, so well, this project was for Fiji. And there are 300 islands in the Fiji group alone. So it was much easier to just focus on the web-based version so that things can update. But so that was the reason why we chose the web version. But again, the long-term plan was always to move to the app because, of course, offline access was the most important thing and is still the most important thing. So that's what the future plan is. In terms of how the students reacted to using Moodle for the first time, I was really surprised. The only difficulty that the head was logging in for the first time. But after that, maybe less than five minutes of an introduction of what to do, where to click. And that was it. And then for the next few weeks that they used the tablet devices, they knew how to turn it on, where to go, how to navigate the course page, how to start with the activity, how to complete the activity, and how to navigate. So we didn't have any issues with the kids, but we did have a lot of issues with the teachers. And again, I wouldn't blame the teachers because they have been teaching for 15, 20, 25 years. And at that time, none of this technology was there. So that is one thing that we now have in Fiji, I guess, in many places as well. So before we can roll out all this technology, our biggest challenge and focus now is how we can upskill all the teachers so that once we bring out this technology, then it's a much more pleasant experience for both the teachers and the students. I really like the addition of animation to keep children interested and copy that app game feel. But I'm wondering, what was your total course size? And do you have a recommendation of an optimal course size? The course size in terms of the file size or the? Yeah, the file size of the final course you created, did you try to work within a limit? Did you make giant courses, lots of small courses? No, again, so connectivity, bandwidth is an issue. So everything that we had, all the images before uploading were all compressed. We did not use any videos because of, again, bandwidth. But one of the feedbacks that we got is that as students, there were animations in the activities. So students would see something like this, they would see animating characters, and they would start turning on the volume. And the complaint was from the students that there's no sound. So that's the other thing that we now need to work on is that, you know, add a bit of audio and maybe video. But the limitation that currently that we have is that, yeah, bandwidth. So we'll need to find a balance. Yeah, thank you. So, sorry, so my question is, is in regards with what you've set up, do you do anything special if the children happen to be, for example, on the autism spectrum, or just different in a way where the normal course might not work for them? Sorry, could you just go over that again, please? Yeah, so my question was, is if in terms of the courses you design, how do you handle students who happen to be neurodivergent or on the autism spectrum? Yeah, so I think one of the reasons for doing this presentation is that, so initially, this was just a very small research just to see how technology can be used. But I think there's a wider need of, you know, to get more people involved. I'm a developer. I've got little teaching experience, but I have not really worked with kids. And we'd like to get, you know, more people involved, especially teachers who work with kids because they've got a different, they've got basically their experience in, you know, how kids learn, how they behave, working with different types of learners. So if we can get more people involved from their feedback, I'm sure we can, you know, build the Moodle interface and also the content. So yeah, we need both developers, teachers and the feedback would help us build a better product.