Plasma educational apps: GCompris

KDE Plasma has a wide range of educational applications. Education is a fundamental right, and technology has the potential to revolutionize the way children and adults learn. This is the start of a series introducing you to some of these applications for you and your children.

J’ai compris

We start with a real gem for your children called GCompris. You don’t have to wonder about the G at the beginning of the name instead of the K. GCompris is nevertheless a pure KDE program. The name stands for the French j’ai compris, which means I understand. GCompris is free software released under the GNU Affero General Public License. This means you can adapt it to your needs, improve it and above all, share it with children everywhere.

Over 180 activities

GCompris was conceived in 2000 by Bruno Coudoin, a software developer from France, and has since become a popular learning tool used by millions of children, parents, and educators worldwide. The software is available in more than 50 languages, making it accessible to children from different cultural backgrounds.

Under constant development, GCompris is a cross-platform learning program for children aged 2 to 10 and is part of the GNU Project. In version 3.1, it contains over 180 fun and educational activities and learning games to help children learn skills such as recognizing letters and numbers, using mouse and keyboard, basic algebra training, reading time on an analogue clock, vector drawing, learning languages through games and much more.

The program also includes a simple word processor to create documents with basic text style. Another activity is the animation tool, which can be used as a simple and effective method to support storytelling, improving communication with children and helping them to express themselves.

Child-friendly to use

GCompris is easy for children to use via the large icons at the top, which divide the range of applications into different sections. The individual sections are divided into the following activities with easily recognizable pictures and writing:

• Discovering the computer: exploring the keyboard, mouse, and touch screen.

• Reading: Letters, words, reading and writing exercises

• Geography: discovering countries, regions, and culture

• Science: the sluice, the water cycle, renewable energies

• Arithmetic: numbers, arithmetic, memory, enumerations, blackboards

• Games: Chess, memory, four wins, hangman, tic-tac-toe …

• Other: colours, shapes, Braille, learning the time…

Adjusting and customizing

The icons at the bottom of the screen can be used to adjust the level of difficulty or configure the audio support, among other things. On the website, a manual in various languages introduces further options such as limiting activities, creating profiles or various start-up options. The software, which started with GNU/Linux, is now also available for macOS, Windows, Android (also in the F-Droid Store) and for the Raspberry Pi.