Opensource / Freeware for Early Years

[BentleyMiller86]

Hi all,

 

I'm after some suggestions for Nursery / Foundation stage educational games, must be free ware or open source and have the ability to be locally installed as there's no internet in some of my foundation units.

 

I have so far:

 

Tux Type https://tux4kids.alioth.debian.org/tuxmath/download.php

Tux Paint Tux Paint

Tux Math https://tux4kids.alioth.debian.org/tuxmath/download.php

Childs Play Childsplay

EduActive8 https://www.eduactiv8.org/en/home/

gCompris GCompris Educational Software

 

I'm particularly interested in something to cover pattern recognition and shape recognition.

 

Thanks

[IreneuszImiolek]

Hi,

 

Just found your post here, thanks for mentioning the eduActiv8. If you don't get much luck finding free software covering the pattern and shape recognition, please let me know, ideally with some information regarding the requirements, that is if you like the rather simplistic style of eduActiv8 project.

 

I have plans to add some activities that would cover patterns, along with hundreds of other things. I have some sketches but somehow couldn't find enough time to do it.

Saying that I can't promise these will be available anytime soon (since currently, I'm busy trying to redesign activities to implement auto checking mechanism, so the kids know where they went wrong).

 

Also please share if you have any feedback that could make this software better.

 

Thanks,

eduActiv8 Dev

[BentleyMiller86]

Hi,

 

I haven't actually tried the software myself, I will put my 2 year old to it when I put my PC back together and give you some feed back

 

Re pattern recognition , I have been asked for something that will present a pattern i.e. #*#*#*?*# and then ask the child what should appear in the pattern where the ? is, it needs to vary if difficulty so the harder it gets the more characters are missing in the chain and the more complex the chain becomes.

 

Thanks

[IreneuszImiolek]

Hi,

I've had some play around with the patterns over the last few days, the difficulty levels may still need some fine-tuning, and will have to get one created for patterns of shapes. I ran out of time for that one. When ready I'll get the update released but for now, have a look at the attached pictures, just to make sure I'm going in the right direction.

 

Thanks,

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]45912[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]45913[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]45914[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]45915[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]45916[/ATTACH]

[IreneuszImiolek]

Not sure what happened with the attached pictures, but they don't seem to work. Try the google drive link for the pictures: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0BzzRSdFJhjQ8NHNMT2FMMGhzWDA?usp=sharing

[BentleyMiller86]

There exactly what I'm looking for! Are these already in Active8?

 

They may be a little complex for starting out, maybe limit the chain to 6 or 9 rather than the 12 you currently have? of course the chains can always get longer as the levels become harder, I will show these to some of the foundation staff and see what they think.

 

Thanks

 

Rob

[IreneuszImiolek]

Sorry for late reply, I was at work and couldn't log in from my mobile (did not realize I need my name, not the email as the username).

 

Unfortunately, it is not released yet. I need to create one more activity, refine the levels and do some testing and then compile for a number of platforms before release. I'll let you know as soon as that's done, but I will be stuck at work for the next few days so not sure how much I'll be able to do in the evenings.

 

I haven't actually shown you the level 1 - it looks rather simple, it starts with a 2 piece pattern with 5 repeats (making it 10 pieces long), and then as levels go up the length of the pattern is increased and more items are removed from the chain.

 

There's also a rather simple way to edit the levels if you need a different behaviour, it's currently not really documented but there is a levels.xml file where you can adjust things for different school years and for each level, or create new levels for that matter. In case of the pattern activity these are the things you can adjust: minimum length of a single pattern term, maximum length of the term, minimum number of repeats, maximum number of repeats, number of fully completed terms, number of partially completed terms, shuffled - if set to True the completed sequences will not necessarily be at the beginning of the chain. The partially completed bit works in a way that all of them together will show the full term at least once, so if 2 of them are used and no fully completed ones with 3 repeats it may, for instance, create "A?C?B????".

[IreneuszImiolek]

So... the program has the new activity added, few minor adjustments to the levels - I might have rushed that a bit, but as mentioned earlier you can easily get these changed - make sure you back up the xml/levels.xml file - it's quite easy to mess this one up i.e. setting max < min will crash the program. The level data for patterns is stored in the last 2 game elements in the levels.xml file. If you manage to come up with anything decent please share and I'll get it added to the program.

 

The program has been updated on SourceForge, but only for Windows and Linux; the MacOS and Android will have to wait. The pattern activities however at the moment will only be available in the English version of the program, although there isn't much text there I didn't have time to get it translated.

 

Also eventually nearly all activities are going to be auto-checked like this one and the language activities, but at the moment most of the maths activities still need this feature implemented.

 

The updated version can be downloaded from https://sourceforge.net/projects/eduactiv8/

 

Thanks