Speaking of children's educational software, I believe many people will first think of the programming platform Scratch, but this article will introduce another project-GCompris. Like Scratch, GCompris is also open source software. More precisely, it is free and open source software because GCompris is part of the GNU project and was previously jointly maintained by the Free Software Foundation and UNESCO. At present, the code of the GCompris project is hosted in the KDE community, and they are responsible for development and maintenance.
As a high-quality children’s education software, GCompris is composed of many learning activities that cover a very wide range of topics, from basic arithmetic and literacy to history, art, geography and technology (such as computer use). For children from 2 to 10 years old, although some of the learning activities are game-oriented and more focused on fun and entertainment, they are at least educational. These activities have been translated into more than 20 languages, so they are popular with teachers, parents and children all over the world. Welcome.
Unfortunately, these languages that have been translated do not include Chinese. To be precise, they support Traditional Chinese but not Simplified Chinese. The reason is that the translation completion degree of Simplified Chinese is low. GCompris stated that it will only issue translations that have a translation completion degree of more than 80%. Language version to ensure that children get a better experience. If you want to provide translation support, please contact [email protected].
Examples of some learning activities and topics:
- Computer exploration: keyboard, mouse, touch screen...
- Reading: letters, words, reading exercises, text input...
- Arithmetic: numbers, operations, table memory, enumeration, double lists
- Science: Canal Gate, Water Cycle, Renewable Energy...
- Geography: country, region, culture...
- Games: Chess, 4-line alignment, memory game, Hangman game, Tic Tac Toe...
- Others: color, shape, braille, recognition time...
On November 19th, GCompris celebrated its 20th anniversary and released version 1.0 . The new version adds more learning activities, including activities that simulate electrical operations (supporting drawing circuits and simulation), addition and subtraction calculation activities, children’s keyboards, and new A more realistic introduction to gravity, there are currently more than 150 learning activities.
In designing learning activities, GCompris follows the principle of "everything goes smoothly". It hopes that children will be encouraged when learning, allowing them to encounter certain challenges, but avoiding the frustration of "threatening". Therefore, a new feature of version 1.0 is that educators can set the difficulty level of learning activities according to the proficiency of each child.
For example, in an activity where children practice numbers, parents or teachers can choose the numbers that children learn, and save the more difficult numbers for later use. The practice time of the activity also supports customization, which can be set to one hour, half an hour, one quarter of an hour, or several minutes, etc.
The operating environment of GCompris has relatively low hardware requirements, and can even run normally on older computers or low-power computers (such as Raspberry Pi). It supports Windows, Android, GNU/Linux and macOS platforms, and can be installed on desktops, On laptops, tablets and mobile devices.
Download link: https://gcompris.net/downloads-en.html
In fact, the full version of GCompris supports free use on all platforms is a policy implemented this year. In the past, in order to promote free software, only the full version of Linux was used for free. For Windows users, it was released in the form of " disabled software ". These users had to pay for the activation code to get the full version, otherwise they could only use the version with missing functions.
By the way, it is said that the French "J'ai compris" is the source of the name GCompris, which means "I have understood" (I understand).