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The Free Educational Software GCompris Comes To Android
New submitter xarma writes GCompris is a reference in its category on GNU/Linux but also on Windows. Its development started in 2000 in Gtk+. Last year the development team, willing to address the tablet and PC users from a single code base, took the hard decision to fully rewrite it in Qt Quick. The new version is now developed under the KDE community umbrella. After one year of work, a first release has been shipped on the Android play store. Continuing on its original funding approach, it remains free software but requires a fee on proprietary platforms.
"gcompris" sounds like "I understand" in French, where the letter G sounds like "j'ai", "I have".
Maybe everyone knew, but it's the first time I hear of this project.
I had to fire up a search engine to figure out what the software is all about. Turns out submitter is in good company, as the software's own website is similarly vague about what it does and why I'd want it. Tentatively I'm going with "this is for kids", and, since the summaries are so vague "nice way to waste a rainy sunday afternoon with trying to install it". The educational lesson here is that these would-be educators are too self-absorbed to want to try and learn anything from.
Requiring fees based on the deployment platform used does not constitute "free" software under any open source definition I have ever read.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
That almost tells us what GCompris is or does, but not quite.
The linked release notes mentions that GCompris is fully translated into 8 languages. But note that it’s also partially translated into (currently) 29 languages. In fact, some of the languages supported don’t even exist as native locales on the Android platform (but you can still choose the language manually, in the GCompris preferences menu).
GCompris was only very recently moved to the KDE infrastructure, and it’s still in the review phase (see the KDE software lifecycle), so not all translation teams have started translating it yet. But hopefully, many more languages will be fully supported in the future. Note that ‘fully supported’ also means custom word lists for each language (for the reading practice activities), and even voice sound files for some of the activities.
I think good language support is very important for educational software like GCompris. And the number of languages (partially or fully) supported shows the power of free software and the free software community. The software can (and will) be translated into smaller languages that are not commercially viable for proprietary software. (Full disclosure: I have been translating GCompris to my native language for a number of years.)
I added a section to the website just for you. Don't you feel special?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Quickie question - this is on both on your home page and your news page. Can you clarify?
As you will see, the full Android version is sold for 6€ now but the price will have to be adjusted to find the optimal one.
Do you consider Android to be proprietary - just wondering.
Also, I'll email you with a correct translation from the original french - click on my user name and scroll to the bottom (slashdot's css is broken again - the user info that used to be beside the list of recent comments no longer fits because ..., well, because this is slashdot :-)
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
No, I'm not GP AC. I do thank you for this section, as it lays out your attitude nice and plain. Keep it along with the buzzword salad, and if my senior developers come and recommend this, I know their nature too. Such valuable insights are hard to come by.
What does "is a reference in its category" mean? They're words, but they don't say anything in English. I need some educational software, I guess.
I've used GCompris (among other tools) last year in a summer camp for children from socially vulnerable families. It was a project powered by volunteers and donations.
The kids enjoyed it very much, due to the variety of activities available - everyone found something to tinker with. If you're interested, have a look at the photos: http://tinco.md/galerie, https://www.facebook.com/TINCO....
Children liked TuxType and Scratch too, but GCompris ranked #1, especially among the younger ones.
Some youngsters in Moldova had a great summer; and who knows - maybe a few of them will build careers related to computers. And that could be your fault (-:
p.s. I am glad it runs on Android now, I've already recommended it to a parent.
The saddest poem
Ok, rant coming. Not objecting to these folks right or choice to charge for commercial use (in fact, I think it's appropriately self-reinforcing and somewhat amusing) but my rant is on a subject that can, at least in one important aspect, be traced back to the more global linux/GUI issue, which this immediately brought to mind. Ahem.
<RANT>
Between a snarkily neurotic prejudice against non-open source and the GPL (but I repeat myself) and no standard, basic GUI available to anyone at no cost or other encumbrance (different from OS X and Windows, which are both, oddly enough, home to myriad small commercial applications not found for linux... the very applications I need to do my work day to day), it seems to me that the linux community has created an almost perfect shoot-thyself-in-the-foot paradigm. Only the foot, never the heart and never the head, but damn... that foot looks like a spaghetti colander to me.
I'm truly appalled by the self-mutilating nature of it all, at the very same time I admire the astonishing effectiveness of such a sparse strategy. It's like finding an ice cube in really hot soup - where the bloody thing refuses to melt.
There are occasionally days when I think to myself, someone oughta do it, maybe I ought to. But then I think to myself, the linux folk, by and large, clearly want to wallow in this lack of commercial attention, this dearth of small, cool GIU applications, problem solvers, games and so on. I guess they should then, and yet another day goes by with linux knocking on the door of "the day of the linux desktop" with no one answering except the already-faithful. [waves at the already faithful, admires their pitchforks and torches]
Then there are the days when it is unavoidably brought to my attention that Apple has managed to really fuck up the underlying *nix nature of OS X, from the broken UDP capabilities to cron being superseded by some abjectly weirded out fuckery to broken and unsupported functionality like UTF-8 printing to the I-always-run-into-it disappointment that arises after trying yet another open source project that simply will not come together properly because of some code difference, or some policy, created by Apple. But on those days, as I'm almost inevitably making something for myself, I jut open a VM, fire up linux, and do the project there, where it will almost certainly config, make and install like a good little project. Those are the days I most regret that linux is not, and apparently will never be, an OS that I can actually use the whole time I'm at my desk, thereby avoiding having to accept the... gifts... Apple (and Microsoft -- but I quit actually using Windows for anything more than a test platform years ago -- open VM, try, works, doesn't work, so noted, close VM) are always so willing to hand me, barbed end first.
Just wanted to say that. I know it isn't going to change. Maybe it shouldn't change. Well, I'll not dwell on it any further. I have to get back to using an operating system that is graced by the actual applications I need to use day to day. Due to, you know, actually being neutral to commercial closed-source developers.
PS... I really enjoy linux. A truly great OS. And what runs on it, and all that is so universal that it might as well be part of the OS, even if it isn't. Everything from cron to Apache. And midnight commander! It's only the tail-chewing open sores nature of the snark-GPL-GUI complex that I react so poorly to.
Ok. Mod me to hell and gone. I feel a tremor in the farce. I'd better get back to my wretched commercial hive of scum and villainy before the linux people come out. They're easily startled, but they'll soon be back, and in pretty much the usual numbers. Cuz, you know, small commercial developers won't... ok, ok, I'm going.
</RANT>
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I think Windows is garbage and so is XChat
I am a parent of a severely disabled child and I also have worked about eight years as a Paraeducator in special education classes.
Congradulations GCompris, I like your package. My compliments on the discovering the mouse and keyboard section. It is the best beginner computer usage I have seen in a long time.
If some day I have the time, I would like to explore using the gcompris package as a starting point for a slideshow program.
I am going to talk about what is needed for conventional computers to be usable by a person of 8 months developmental age. Every kid is unique but if you think about what an 8 month old baby can do, that is the level of control some delayed persons have of their hands.
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The young persons I work with presently can hit a button to roll a bowling ball in a bowling game, and typically the person's attention span ends after about a minute. The whole metaphor of the bowling game is understood very faintly. The kids have gone to a bowling alley and they have rolled a bowling ball. So the sounds of a bowling alley were heard by the young persons once.
The big problem with really limited kids are the desktop's assumptions about how to start a program, and all the ticky clicky stuff adults do with ease. It takes a person with substantial motor skill always present to start programs and intervene when the kid has inadvertently left the program or triggered an error condition. Regarding the kids I work with, their brain has limited control of the arms. Instead of fingers, think of these kids as having 6 inch diameter pillows. Motor control is limited to "fling now" alternating with "fling and sweep and giggle". On the sensory side, I think the most often needed thing is repeat or time delay or more time to process what is showing on the screen. There is a loop from the eye, to the memory and matching area to the formation of motor control messages to the arms, In limited kids there is reduced resolution or fewer layers of abstraction and memory matching and more time may be needed and the fineness of the control motions may be only wait or go.
About 10 years ago I made a bootable Linux CD that jumped into mplayer and played a home video. It was quite slow. My handicapped daughter preferred using a video recorder. Despite really limited motor control, she could hit the buttons for play and rewind. She would pick short sections of the video and play them over and over. Like Dick Van Dyke's poem about girls in Mary Poppins. My daughter was studying the video by watching the scene over and over. I know my daughter was listening to the poem and figuring it out. She has done this with a number of videos. A CD player is too fussy for her, and no computer or laptop or Ipad has big and rugged control buttons.
One kid at this level could use an I-pad. He would swat or swipe until he brought up either a country and western music video or he would look at photos made at home. After a couple of months, I understand, he threw the Ipad and broke it.
What I would like is a toolkit to make packaged slideshows or movies on hard disk with a sound track of my choosing such as the audio from a youtube.com. The toolkit would wrap the whole contents in a mouse and keyboard control envelope. The whole conrol would be "rewind or play". The envelope would be something like "mynameislee" and "leeontheplayground" or "shortlionkingvideoforlee"
The final thing is, If your are writing a program for very limited kids, make sure the program is not destroyed if the computer is powered off while the program is playing or paused. Our class room recently lost a $300 program when I turned the Imac off while the $300 program together with half a day of my time organizing the images for a teach shapes and geometery content assignment was running in the background. Thanks to Ironclad copyright and must pay rules of professional software. You are doing the right thing to publish open source.
Slideshows are a way to present to the child pictures of himself and pictures of other persons. At eight months developmental age, the young person is somewhere on the way to understanding he is an individual and there are other people like peers and others. It is a time when recognizing images in a mirror and being greeted by the teacher and saying hello to other peers begins to take place.