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Overview of Software in EducationTechnology is changing the classroom experience—altering the way students learn and teachers teach. With these changes, ISVs have new opportunities to enhance the educational experience. |
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Software Advancing Education
Educators all over the world are constantly seeking to open up and explore new facets for student advancement. Software plays a significant role in combination with hardware, services, and instructional approaches in transforming education, resulting in greater student access and achievement. Intel provides the critical foundation from which educators, governments, and communities can benefit from the unprecedented potential of technology today and in the future.
On Intel platforms designed for education, a bundled suite of software helps students develop 21st century skills. By encouraging students to learn through exploration and interpretation, teachers gain the tools needed to facilitate learning and more efficiently manage their classrooms. At the same time, streamlined IT helps protect students and manage technology—creating a seamless addition to the educational experience.
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What is the Intel Education Solution?Skills like digital literacy, communication, critical thinking, and collaboration provide the foundation for knowledge creation and a springboard for future innovators. This precept drives the development of Intel® Education Solutions. It includes infrastructure, hardware, software, content, training and support delivered by local vendors to meet local needs. Intel Education Solutions have been proven to improve literacy rates and school attendance, thus improving economic prospects in cities and towns worldwide. Explore the Intel® Education Solution › |
Intel Involved in Education |
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Education Solution for 1:1 eLearningAt the heart of Intel® Education Solutions are learning-ready systems featuring Intel technologies. These systems are helping educators improve teaching and instruction both in and out of the classroom for more than one million students in over 60 countries around the world. While these platforms begin in the classroom, their impact extends into communities looking to solve environmental, agricultural and healthcare challenges. Explore a Complete Education Solution › |
Intel Education AllianceThe Intel® Education Alliance brings together software, hardware, content, infrastructure and service providers to deliver locally relevant, integrated solutions to classrooms worldwide. This ecosystem enables a comprehensive, sustainable solution while increasing local ICT capacity and creating economic development opportunities. Explore the Intel® Education Alliance › |
Overview of Software in Education
Software is one vital component of Intel’s total approach to education. Here are the other elements that work together to support a holistic approach to education.
Exposure & Opportunities for Software in Education
 Opportunity In EducationWith over 7 million systems shipped to classrooms in over 70 countries around the world, Intel® Education Solutions are changing the way students worldwide learn. As members of the Intel® Education Alliance, ISVs gain access to resources and insights needed to bring great software to students. |
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Intel Connects Technology to Education with Enhanced Visibility
One of the primary benefits of engaging with the Intel® Developer Zone around educational software is the opportunity for your solution to gain extra visibility with educators around the globe. Your classroom-designed software can be shown off with screen captures, videos and more—and may even gain extended exposure in spaces like the Intel® Education Showcase.
Through promotional channels like the Intel Education Showcase, you could:
- Find Education Customers: Gain exposure with educators looking for school administration and classroom management software, and students looking for study aids.
- Increase Your Visibility: Selected software titles will be listed on an education-focused section of intel.com that pairs software with hardware platforms.
- Be Part of an Education Solution: Tap into collaboration opportunities with Intel’s network of value-added resellers to open up channels and business opportunities.
View the Intel® Education Showcase ›
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Intel® Education Alliance: Voucher Program
Software developers and companies also have an opportunity to join the Intel® Education Alliance. By bringing together a strong ecosystem of PC manufacturers, operating system vendors, education service providers, application software and digital content providers, the program helps deliver a total education solution. With the Intel Education Alliance, governments and schools can choose the right mix of teaching and learning tools to meet their educational goals.
The Intel® Education Alliance Voucher Program gives members new opportunities to create customized and localized solutions for customers. Intel® Education OEMs and Value-Added Alliance members developing education hardware or software are eligible to participate. Join this program to help deliver the total educational solution that educators want and students need.
Explore the Intel Education Alliance Voucher Program ›
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Become an Intel® Software PartnerEducation software companies that become Intel® Software Partners gain access to tools and resources that can grow global awareness around their software solutions. |
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Learn About the Intel® Education AllianceEducation software providers have an opportunity to join the Intel Education Alliance and gain added exposure by showcasing their software alongside Intel Education Solutions. |
Software Success in Education
For education-focused ISVs looking to get into the classroom, the Intel® Education Alliance provides a way to connect the latest platforms with your software solutions. Here’s how one ISV worked with Intel.
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Intel® Education Helps Adaptive Curriculum™ Develop Flexible CoursewareWho: Adaptive Curriculum™ Programs related to the Intel® Developer Zone give Adaptive Curriculum™ the means to develop a highly flexible courseware experience for students. Working with Intel enabled Adaptive Curriculum to not only get support in optimizing their learning software for the latest Intel platforms, but also gain exposure for their other products. With help from Intel, Adaptive Curriculum’s flexible, comprehensive approach to technology-driven instruction can support either small-group or individual instruction—a key goal of Intel® Education. |
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Intel® Education & Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. |
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Intel® Education & Con Saber Humano |
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Childtopia: Gaming Initiative Fosters Children's Development |
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Intel® Education & Metasys* |
Education Software & devices
Intel is committed to accelerating access, promoting quality education, and advancing innovation. Part of this commitment to improving education means encouraging the development of software built for computing platforms that support and enable learning for students in the 21st century.
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Intel® Education SoftwareIntel Education Software brings together a comprehensive collection of applications that help students develop 21st century skills. By encouraging learning through exploration and interpretation, teachers facilitate development and efficiently manage their classroom—while protecting students and boosting efficiency through optimized IT management. These applications are selected by Intel based on educational and technical evaluations and come preloaded as part of the Intel Education Solution. |
Intel® Education DevicesIntel® Architecture-based products offer the flexibility of an open architecture so that educators can choose the peripherals, software and infrastructure they need—making it easy to integrate into the classroom now and in the future. These full-featured solutions support the development of 21st century skills anywhere, anytime students are learning. As an added benefit, manageability and security are provided to keep students safe while protecting the technology investment. |
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Compelling Software for the Classroom and Beyond
- Create solutions that can teach, inspire, and enhance productivity
- Discover vital factors in developing for students and teachers
- Expand by targeting Ultrabooks™, tablets, and convertibles
- Take full advantage of touch and sensors
- Connect with resources from Intel and the rest of the community
Developing applications for a new platform can be challenging, but it doesn’t have to be intimidating. The resources listed here are selected to help you get started making the design decisions to build outstanding education applications for Ultrabooks™, tablets and convertibles.
Ultrabook™ Resources:
The Four Vectors of Ultrabook Development: Expand your horizons through understanding the touch, sensor, graphics, power, and performance features of the Ultrabook platform.
Choosing between Desktop and Windows 8 UI Modes: Windows 8 Store applications are designed with the touch experience at the forefront. Learn the advantages of developing your application for either mode and choosing between the two.
Developing Apps for Touch and Sensor Input: Unleash the possibilities of built-in touch and sensor support in new hardware platforms such as Ultrabooks, to create immersive education apps that use audio, visual, or kinesthetic mechanisms.
Getting Started with Ultrabook Development: Develop a firm understanding of Ultrabook hardware capabilities to prepare yourself for successful app development for Windows 8 on the Ultrabook platform.
What is an Ultrabook? Learn how an Ultrabook device is different from conventional laptops available in the market, to identify how those differences create developer opportunity.
For a more technical deep-dive on Ultrabook content, visit the Intel® Developer Zone Ultrabook Community.
Windows* 8 Resources:
Next Steps:
- Join the Intel® Developer Zone
- Become a Black Belt Developer – Learn how
- Contribute to Intel blogs
- Ask an expert in the Developer Forum
Live, Hands-on Design & Coding Instruction:
AppLabs focus on sample applications and code walkthroughs that show you how to create applications for today's consumer and business vertical segments of education, healthcare, retail, and finance. Sessions will also show how you can take advantage of our Intel Developer Zone program resources to design, build, test, and market your application in these target segments.
Perceptual Computing Contest:
Enter the Intel® Perceptual Computing Challenge, a $1 million developer contest that runs throughout 2013. The Challenge has two phases, both promoting development using the Intel Perceptual Computing SDK and Creative* Interactive Gesture Camera. A total of $185,000 in cash prizes are at stake in Phase 1, with $20,000 each going to the top four application prototypes. Winners will be announced in March 2013, and Phase 2 of the Challenge follows with over $800,000 in total prizes. Learn more about this exciting technology, download the SDK, and participate in both phases of the Challenge. Enter today!
Various form factors and hardware capabilities offered by devices that run Windows* 8 pose new challenges that must be addressed during application design to ensure a good user experience on each device.
Touch:
Most modern mobile devices feature touch capability, for fluid and ergonomically friendly interaction. Research has shown that users of devices with both touch and keyboard/mouse inputs prefer to use both, depending on the nature of the application. Touch is compelling for education apps, to keep users engrossed and improve the learning experience.
Reimagining Apps for Ultrabook™: Develop a firm understanding of key design considerations for touch interactions, touch targets, touch gestures, and more.
User Experience / User Interface:
Designing for different form factors:
The days are past when interaction was limited to the keyboard and mouse. Devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, and Ultrabooks come with touch built in, which demands new design approaches to suit different orientations, screen resolutions, form factors, and usage models, creating flexible and compelling user experiences.
Developing with Desktop Natural User Interface APIs for Developers: Prepare to build touch-aware applications by upgrading to new frameworks where possible, paying attention to sizing and spacing of controls, and registering and handling touch events.
Designing for Ultrabook Devices and Touch-Enabled Desktop Applications: Get started with taking advantage of the new features offered by Ultrabooks and explore how to build applications that are touch-enabled.
Designing for Ultrabook Convertibles:
Devices like the Lenovo Yoga* support compelling usage models based on their ability to be used as conventional laptops as well as like tablets. That variety demands careful design based on new considerations to create a good user experience.
Ultrabook Convertible Application Design Considerations: Create unique user experiences based on the ability to create, collaborate, and communicate with apps designed specifically for convertibles that can act either like laptops or tablets.
Sensors:
Unconventional usage models in education applications can teach difficult subjects and keep students’ focus with the benefit of context awareness and interactivity. For example, near-field communication can allow students to share notes, and GPS can help them learn geography. Informed design choices can help take advantage of sensors such as the accelerometer, gyroscope, ambient light sensor, compass, and GPS.
Sensor Development Guide for Windows 8 Ultrabook and Tablet: Get up to speed on the Windows 8 sensors application programming interfaces (APIs), with a specific focus on the various sensor capabilities available in Windows 8 Desktop mode.
Windows 8 Considerations:
When designing education apps for Windows 8, consider devices ranging from large screens to small tablets, with various aspect ratios, in both portrait and landscape orientations. Engage users from the Start screen with live tiles, and consider implementing the app bar when contextual actions are available, moving menus and controls toward the edges of the screen to allow for smoother thumb operation, especially in landscape mode.
Take advantage of the full spectrum of user interactions in Windows 8, including touch, pen, keyboard (including arrow keys), mouse, and even external game controllers. Finally, sharing contracts between games can add another dimension to the education experience, by incorporating the web, social media, and email, for example.
After thinking through the design considerations for developing a compelling education app, it is time to determine what resources will best take you through the next steps as you start developing your application.
Windows* 8 / Ultrabook™ / Tablet Resources:
Windows 8 Store versus Desktop App Development: Make informed decisions between desktop mode and Windows 8 Store mode, based on a specific application’s capabilities and purpose.
Getting Started with Ultrabook Development: Learn what the Windows 8 UI offers, including how it represents a big shift from the Windows 7 interface, as well as nuances of the Windows 8 UI and some basic steps to help you get started.
Ultrabook Feature Compatibility Matrix for Windows 8 Development: Compare capabilities and features supported by various programming models using programming languages such as C++, C#, Javascript/HTML5, and Unity*.
Using Windows 8 WinRT API from Desktop Applications: Learn capabilities and best practices for accessing portions of the WinRT API from the desktop world.
Ultrabook Touch and Sensor Resources: Get answers to your touch and sensor enabling questions with resources such as a sensor development guide API reference, guidelines for sensor detection, and instructions for enabling touch in Windows Store Mode apps.
Developing Graphics Applications on the Ivy-Bridge Ultrabook Devices: Take advantage of Intel® HD Graphics in second-generation Ultrabooks, combined with touch and sensor capabilities for exciting and immersive education usage models.
Code Samples for Sensors and Touch in Windows 8 Apps:
Learn by example how platform capabilities can be implemented in code:
- Ultrabook Desktop App development on Windows 8: Photo Application with Touch and Sensors
- Using NFC (Near Field Communication) from Windows 8 Application
- Geo-location on Windows 8 desktop applications using WinRT
- Touch Reactive Samples with Bubbles
- Touch Samples for Windows 8 Desktop and Windows 8 Store
- More samples for Touch and Sensors on Ultrabook
Sample Apps from the Recent App Innovation Contest:
The App Innovation Contest was hosted by the CodeProject and sponsored by Intel® Software to foster app innovation with new Ultrabook user experiences and usage models based on touch and sensors.
- Sumerics by Florian Rappl achieves complex numerics with the ability to create outstanding plots.
- Word Ladder by ZettaVision helps users learn to recognize and spell frequently used words in the English language.
- OhmsLawWin8 by Haresh Dave offers a way to bring practical lab sessions home.
- EasyWords by Alper Barkmaz helps users easily memorize words while learning a new language.
For more on contests, visit the Contest Zone.
HTML5 Development Resources:
HTML5 is an open standard that allows developers to write once and run anywhere. This cross-platform approach greatly increases a developer’s total potential audience while providing users a more consistent experience across different screen sizes.
- HTML5 Document library
- HTML5 Videos
- Getting Started with the Intel® HTML5 Development Environment
- Building Cross-Platform Apps with HTML5
- Adding Ultrabook Sensor Control To HTML5 Apps
Learn, Create and Publish on the HTML5 Zone.
Ultrabooks, convertibles, tablets, and smartphones running on Windows* open up opportunities to Android and iOS developers to develop for and port to Intel® architecture.
Porting from Android to the x86 Platform:
NDK Android Application Porting Methodologies: Starting with a working NDK based ARM application, walk through porting tips to get the application recognized on the Android Market for x86 devices.
Porting Android Touch to Windows 8 UI: Port a pre-existing touch-enabled Android app to the Windows 8 UI, while learning tips, tricks, and best practices for porting Android apps to a Windows 8 tablet.
Porting Android Apps to Windows 8: Familiarize yourself with key differences between the Android and Windows 8 platforms, including developer tools, app framework differences, and comparisons between app creation, packaging and app stores.
Porting from iOS to the x86 platform:
Porting iOS Custom Charts and Graphs to Windows 8 UI: Learn how to create custom graphics and charts in a Windows 8 Store app, including porting the rich custom graphics and charts experience from iOS to Windows 8 Store mode.
Porting App Life Cycle, Settings and Search features from iOS to Windows 8: Learn how to port platform-agnostic features such as search, settings, app life cycle, and state maintenance from existing iOS apps to the Windows 8 platform. The article also compares search implementation between iOS and Windows 8, including how to persist and recover states during different app cycle states.
Porting Basic App User Interface from iOS to Windows 8: Learn to port basic UI design of an application from iOS to Windows 8, on various form factors such as tablets and Ultrabooks™.
Porting Advanced User Interfaces from iOS to Windows 8: Build on the article above with a demonstration of how to port advanced UI features from iOS to Windows 8.
Software optimizations are needed to take full advantage of the hardware-based performance and energy-efficiency capabilities built into Ultrabooks™ and other modern devices. These capabilities are vital to students and teachers who place large performance demands on their devices and who spend long hours using them where finding a power source may not always be easy.
Ultrabook™ Resources:
Developing Power-Efficient Apps for Ultrabook Devices: Find resources on topics such as power-optimization tools, choice of algorithms, multi-threading, vectorization, event-driven software, and context-awareness that affect battery life.
Writing Energy-Efficient Windows* Store Applications for Mobile Devices - Impact of CPU Utilization on Platform Power: Learn how file I/O, network transfer, and sensor usage affect platform power.
Writing Energy-Efficient Windows Store Applications for Mobile Devices: Impact of Graphical Intensive Application on Processor Power Learn how graphics-intensive applications and the Windows Runtime* API impact processor power.
Performance Development for Ultrabook™ Devices using 3rd Generation Intel® Core™ Processor (code named Ivy-Bridge): Learn strategies for design, programming, and optimization of efficient concurrent applications.
Platform Resources:
WiDi using Intel® WiDi Extensions SDK allows application you to extend your users experience to an HDTV using Intel Wireless Display (Intel WiDi).
Intel® VPro™ Platforms bring significant management, security and virtualization capability to applications used within an IT managed environment.
Intel® SBA Technology allows you to bring maintenance, security & virtualization for applications deployed without IT support.
Media hardware acceleration using the Intel® Media SDK Intel Media SDK 2012 is the software development library that exposes Intel platforms' industry-leading media acceleration capabilities (encoding, decoding and transcoding).
Next Steps:
Become an Intel® Software Partner
News for software partners
Software developers
Deliver compelling apps for your education customers on Ultrabook™ and Windows* 8
Education Software Showcase
Help students learn through exploration and differentiation.
