StarOffice 4 Kids is a product suite for teachers and students that has emerged from a technological research project - in collaboration with Sun Microsystems, Inc. and the Heinz-Nixdorf-Institut der Universität Paderborn. kippdata has developed StarOffice 4 Kids into an integrated learning environment with a highly flexible functionality and user interface.

StarOffice 4 Kids has been uniquely designed for easy customization by individual teachers to support specific learning objectives. It is aligned to the needs of a teacher and his or her specific teaching materials and not vice versa.

StarOffice 4 Kids allows the teacher to handle an interactive learning process according to learning steps that he or she considers appropriate. Not only according to the age-specific steps of the class, but also in regard to the individual learning progress of the class or a selected group of students. Adjusted to the learning speed of the students a teacher could, for example, easily focus on the fundamentals of word processing. The teacher could start with work sheets with just the functions for using of texts in different fonts and font sizes. Once the students have learnt how to use those functions, the teacher could add new functions to the function toolbar and teach those in a next step.

StarOffice 4 Kids makes it easy for the teacher to produce documents for the exercises in class. A teacher can easily transform usual office documents into task sheets for the class and store them into the subject specific folders. The students will find them in the workspace of their class. They will work on them and save them in their own workspace. This workspace only contains the personal files and that is protected from the access of other students.

StarOffice 4 Kids documents and user interfaces are based on an XML data format, augmenting the open source StarOffice/OpenOffice format. That way StarOffice 4 Kids guarantees smooth integration and immediate use of external teaching material as provided by publishers in education. Teachers could directly take on the teaching material they need and use it in class.

StarOffice 4 Kids complements the organization of classes and allows teachers to:

• ease the workflow of class tests through its extensive customization features applied to test sheets and exercise sheets,
• store working material for teachers and students in different user workspaces for the class and the individual student,
• have private workspaces for teachers.

The protected private workspace for the teacher enables:

• The easy preparation of task sheets and class tests with a special learning content
• The selection of functionality visible in the user interface in line with the desired learning objective.
• The storage of specific research material for lesson preparation or result sheets.

The students workspace in StarOffice 4 Kids allows an overall easy handling through its learn-oriented design of all user elements. Easy symbols and the restriction to specific lesson-relevant functions to make the learning process easier and more efficient.

The internationalized release 1.0 of StarOffice 4 Kids was presented for the first time by kippdata at the Sun Microsystems Worldwide Education and Research Conference in San Francisco, February 24th until 27th, 2003 and at the CeBIT Fair in Hanover, Germany, March 12th until 19th, 2003.