14 DAY TRIAL // GCompris, an educational software suite that provides fun activities for kids aged 2 to 10, is now at version 14.03.
Unfortunately for the Linux platform, there aren't many educational applications designed to be used by small children. Now, with the rise of the Linux OSes, more people will want software for this specific purpose.
Even if GCompris has very little competition, it still is an exceptional application that comes with a ton of fun features. For example, kids can find out how the keyboard, mouse, and different mouse gestures work, can learn arithmetic (table memory, enumeration, double entry table, mirror image), science (the canal lock, the water cycle, the submarine, electric simulation), can start grasping notions of geography, and much more.
“Currently GCompris offers in excess of 100 activities and more are being developed. GCompris is free software, that means that you can adapt it to your own needs, improve it and, most importantly, share it with children everywhere,” say the developers on the official website.
The latest GCompris 14.03 version is quite extensive and the developers have managed to implement a large number of fixes and new features. For example, support has been implemented for multigraph languages in click_on_letter by GunChleoc, a font selector has been added in the config dialog box and it has replaced the skin selector, the torta py pastel has been replaced in the Spanish text exercise, and support has been added for localized sound.
Also, a cute background has been added to the hexagon, missing word files have been added to the Hangman, the administration feature has been fixed and now it accepts UTF-8 user entries, the wartercycle and hydroelectric activity click events have been fixed, the Config dialog layout has been changed to make more room for texts, the administration layout has been improved, the selection of internal gnuchess by default has been fixed, and many language packs have been upgraded.
The developer of GCompris doesn't provide any binary files, only the source package. This means that you will have to compile the software yourself, just like any other software. Also, keep in mind that the GCompris is pretty large and there are quite a few dependencies. It's very likely that it will take users quite a while to finish and get it up and running.
More details about the new features, changes, and fixes can be found in the official announcement. You can also download GCompris 14.03 right now from Softpedia.