Turn your Ubuntu into Edubuntu “Lite”
If you’re like me, you want the best of all worlds 
I want my Ubuntu to have all the great educational tools that are on the Edubuntu Distro, but I don’t want a separate environment. I want to let my kids on my Ubuntu computer for an hour to play math and spelling games, but then jump right back to my work environment.
Edubuntu has a vast selection of educational programs. You may not want (or don’t have room) to install over 500MB of new packages. Instead, here’s the top educational tools that by adding them to your Ubuntu, your kids will certainly enjoy. These packages will give you a good taste of the Edubuntu suite of programs before you decide if you want to add the rest. All of these tools can easily by installed in Synaptic Package Manager, or on your terminal command line (e.g. sudo apt-get install kalzium , etc…)
kalzium screenshot
Kalzium – Periodic table of elements
Kbruch – A great math game / skills test. The kids (and adults) will have a lot of fun with this. This is a KDE tool, but it works great on my Gnome Ubuntu
Khangman screenshot
Khangman – A simple but effective visual hangman game to encourage your kids to practice their spelling. Comes with nice background choices and hints.
Tuxpaint – Tux Paint is a drawing program aimed at younger kids. It includes audio sounds integrated with the actions being drawn. For example, you can “stamp” a frog on the screen and hear the sound that a frog makes too.
Tux Typing – A nice typing tutor that adds a space-invader type arcade game. You save the Linux penguin from being smothered by the falling words by correctly typing them.
Tux Math – A nice game / math learning tool integration.
Tux4Kids – Another great learning tool from the Tux group.
Gcompris – Kindergarten aged kids will love this learning program. There are many different modules, including spelling, math, telling time, etc… (Gnome based tool that works in Kubuntu as well)
It’s amazing that all these tools are open-source. Grab then now and make Ubuntu that fun learning tool you always wanted for your kids.
June 12th, 2009 at 5:01 am
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June 12th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Another one of my favourites is Step – a physics simulator. In general KDE Education (kdeedu) package has lots of very cool apps for schools and education.