Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Open Source Software Review – ChildsPlay

Childsplay

Childsplay website:  http://www.schoolsplay.org/



Older Version
 
Childsplay is an Open Source program that is primarily designed around the K-1 user.  As with any program it has its issues.  Within the program students are allowed to do a number of activities ranging from puzzles, typing, letter and number identification, spelling, memory and various other activities. 

Childsplay provides several features for users and developers of activities:
  • memory activities that are fun to play and at the same time learn sounds, images, letters and numbers.
  •   
    Updated Version
    
  • activities that train the child to use the mouse and keyboard.
  • pure game activities like puzzles, pong, pacman and billiards.
  • 
  • multilingual support, even right to left languages (via Pango).
  • solid data logging to monitor the children's progress; locally (SQLite) or over network (MySQL or any other db supported by SQLAlchemy).
  • set of OpenOffice reports to print this data (still in development state).
  • 
  • object oriented framework for easy activity development in Python/PyGame.
  • good support by the developers and translators.

Childsplay supports the following platforms:  Linux, Mac & Windows


Reviews: