Free Resources from the Net for (Special) Education

Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff.

The free downloadable program I am featuring today comes from Tux’s friends in the open source Linux community. It offers numerous well designed early learning activities for young children. Some of the activites are available for Windows as well as for Linux users.

Gcompris (downloadable program) This is a free suite of attractive interactive learning activities. Each activity is brightly coloured and accompanied by gentle music. The user interface is simple and uncluttered, and and all activities come with a set of basic instructions for teachers and parents. Gcompris comes to us from France, but it is available in numerous languages.

The games, puzzles and mental challenges of Gcompris are organized under the following headings: Discover the Computer; Discovery Activities (colours, sounds, memory); Experiential Activities (based on physical movement); Mathematics; Puzzles; Reading; Strategy Games.

All activities are available at multiple levels of difficulty. The developers say they have targeted Gcompris for children aged 2 to 10. As I tried the activities, however, I wondered if many children under the age of 5 would be able to use Gcompris independently. Perhaps this says more about me than about Gcompris, but I was stretched just a little in completing one of the puzzles at the higher levels of difficulty.

Gcompris has been developed primarily for Linux operating systems, but it is also available for Windows. There are approximately 100 activities in the free Linux version and about 25 free activities for Windows. I tested the Windows version, and found that there was considerable variety and plenty to work with. Windows users must pay €20 to activate the full suite.

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