Educational games

DoudouLinux contains ten educational games for children from 2 years old. At the beginning the goal of these games is just to teach children how to move the mouse. Then as they discover the keyboard they can train to more involved and complex activities like learning the alphabet, counting, guessing series, etc.

The educational game list displayed below with links to their websites are the following:

• Gamine, from 2 years old or even less!
• Pysycache, from 3 years old
• Tux Paint, from 3 years old
• Childsplay, from 4 years old
• Gcompris, from 2 years old but we rather recommend from 4 years old given the DoudouLinux configuration
• Klettres, from 4 years old
• Ktuberling, from 3 years old
• Khangman, rather around 7 years old
• Kanagram, rather around 8 years old
• Kgeography, rather around 7 years old

Explanation texts coming more or less from these application websites are given below.

Gamine animation

Gamine

Gamine targets very young children who will discover mouse moving. The basic idea is to reproduce a magic slate. All they can do is draw a line which follows the mouse cursor and inserting some shapes when they click the mouse buttons, in a pleasant audio background environment. Since it runs in full screen, this kind of application typically avoids children from involuntarily making disasters…

Pysycache - Youtube

Pysycache

Teach children to use the mouse! To do this Pysycache provides pleasant activities based on simple objects and numerous photos. Children learn to place the mouse on screen and then press its buttons. This is the next step after Gamine.

Note: this game is available in both most advanced activities “Mini DoudouLinux” and “All DoudouLinux” with a higher and higher difficulty level.

Tuxpaint - Youtube

Tux Paint

Tux Paint is a drawing application for children from 3 to 12 years old. It has an easily accessible graphical interface. Funny sounds brighten the different tools up. Children draw on a white page using tools and stamps, or may load a template to be decorated with all the tools that are available. Artistic results guaranteed!

Childsplay - Youtube

Childsplay

Childsplay is an educational game featuring a set of activities:

• activities to learn to use both keyboard and mouse
• memory with images and sounds
• learning letters and figures
• fun activities (puzzles, pacman, billiard, etc.)

Gcompris - Youtube

Gcompris

Gcompris is educational software featuring various activities for children from 2 to 10 years old. Activities may be fun but they are always educational. Activities cover the following fields:

• discovering computer → keyboard, mouse, moving mouse
• mathematics → table revision, enumeration, double entry tables, mirror image, …
• sciences → electricity, the canal lock, the water cycle, the submarine, …
• geography → place countries on a map
• games → chess, memory, connect 4, oware, sudoku ...
• reading → reading practice
• other → learn to tell time, puzzle of famous paintings, vector drawing, cartoon making, ...

In total, Gcompris offers at least 100 activities! Thus children of 2 or 3 years old are likely to have difficulties to reach the activities that suit them. For them we should configure Gcompris in a very restricted mode but this is not the case of DoudouLinux. However this software is proposed in both most advanced activities “Mini DoudouLinux” and “All DoudouLinux” with activities of higher and higher difficulty level.

Klettres

Klettres

Learn the alphabet and… the location of keys on keyboard! The computer tells a letter and shows it, children have to press the correct key on keyboard. Upper difficulty levels remove letter displaying or/and replace letters by syllables. Please note that this may also be interesting software for adults to learning to say the alphabet in a foreign language.

Ktuberling

Ktuberling

The classical Mr Potato in digital version (Mr e-Potato!). He can be disguised and a voice tells the noun of elements being dragged with the mouse. Again running it in a foreign language can be interesting for adults.

Khangman

Khangman

A hang man game that is not so easy for children… Fortunately clues are available.

Kanagram

Kanagram

Children have to reorder the letters of a word. Again this is not so easy and clues are available whenever ideas are missing…

Kgeography

Kgeography

An application to learn geography. It provides countries of the world and states of USA.