GCompris Needs $25,000

GCompris, the free and open sourced educational software used in schools worldwide, is running a campaign which, if successful, will allow them to redo the look of the whole platform. Designed for young children, GCompris helps with motor skills, math, physics, literacy, geography, and much more. Now you can help GCompris to continue improving the software.

Available for Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and Android, GCompris is a learning environment mainly geared towards young learners. It can be used both as a self-study tool and for revision.

The kiddie friendly environment shows activities organised by topic. From the colourful main screen, you can, for example, click on the cute little cow, and you’ll access the literacy exercises. You can also play games that allow you to understand gravity and inertia, solve math problems, run simulations, or play games that improve motor skills and memory.

Each activity starts off very easy and gradually gets harder and harder as the students get better. The students’ progress is registered in a special file the teacher can check by starting the program in administration mode. In admin mode the teacher can also decide what activities to show, register new students, and group students together into virtual “classes”. GCompris allows teachers to customise activities, adding new puzzles, increasing vocabulary lists, and so on. It also comes in many languages and new languages get added and improved all the time.

Apart from customising existing activities, Gcompris also allows third parties to create new activities using an open Python API.

The current campaign is to collect money to fund designer Timothée Giet to re-design the GCompris graphics. The current graphics were originally created (and copy-pasted from elsewhere) by the developers, and are old-fashioned, inconsistent, and often downright ugly. With the money they raise, they hope to be able to redo all the images. You can also donate to the project in general to ensure the developers can continue working on expanding and improving the code.

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