Ideas for activities

We already have a large number of activities in GCompris (about 120) and we are always looking at adding more. An important aspect is to keep the project focused on its core value: educating young children.

Each activity requires a good thinking of the educational aspect including a progressive difficulty, it must be easy to understand what we expect from the children by providing instruction and in game guidance.

If we consider the activity list, currently our biggest weaknesses are in the area of reading/writing and language.

Core values

In GCompris all the activities follow the same core values:

• we do not follow a specific country curriculum because we want to be international
• as we want to be international it makes some developments more complex but we are happy to do it
• we don't force children to follow a specific path in the software
• we don't put time limit because this kind of tuning exclude children with disabilities
• we let the children select the difficulty level and do nothing to determine it is appropriate or not for her
• we do nothing to render the children addict
• the software does not replace a teacher or a parent
• the software does not really teaches, it is a complement to a traditional teaching course

Port to Qt Quick

We started to rewrite GCompris in the Qt Quick technology. This will allow us to bring our work to tablet users. Here is a quick startup guide to start developping in the new environment. We maintain a page with the status of the port.

This is currently the most important task.

Standard compliance

IMS

We have to look at the IMS Question & Test Interoperability standard. Look at these examples to get an idea of what kind of questionnaire can be created. This project is open source implementation.

Wims

Wims is Web exercice server and HTML player. It contains a lot of mathematical exercices defined in a format named OEF. We can imagine a GCompris activity that can play some Wims exercices.

Reference

A very good resource of in class activities introducing computer science

Maths

Object Classification

For young kids, we could create an activity where they must classify object from larger to smaller, and so on. The size classification could be based on the real-life sizes. For example, a car is larger than a light bulb, but the actual images could be equal size.

We could also have classification based on shape, e.g. round apples and wheels, and rectangular books and doors.

Could teach also "in front of" and "behind" concept.

Symmetrical drawing

A symmetrical drawing activity, with various forms of symmetries. See this example.

Double entry tables

We already have one in this area based on the puzzle activity engine. But is is not flexible enough and it would be better to have an activity dedicated to this concept.

In that activity, we could add :

- filling incomplete tables. The filled stop may be done by selecting images or by entering text or number. For example, it may also be used to try the children on multiplication table. - choosing the right heading for rows and columns of an already filled-in table

Interactive geometry

Like Dr.Geo or Carmetal does, we can provide an interactiv geometry activity.

Of course we have to make it much simpler and stick to point, line, segment, perpendicular, parallel and circle.

This can be used: - as a free geometrical drawing activity - as a directed one, the children is given a set of instructions like draw a 3 cm diameter circle at position (3,3).

There is a possibility to save and load a drawing.

A graph tool

Like the drawing, animation, wordprocessor, we could provide a graph tool to let kids create simple graph for their experiences. They could load/save them. We could see it as a simplified spreadsheet. Here is an online example.

Mathematical numeral systems

An activity to explain the different base. It present the concept, let the children play around with a virtual base counter and then ask questions to transform numbers from one base to another.

Ken-Ken

This is a Sudoku like activity where the goal of each puzzle is to fill a grid with digits –– 1 through 4 for a 4×4 grid, 1 through 5 for a 5×5, etc. –– so that no digit appears more than once in any row or any column (a Latin square). Grids range in size from 3×3 to 9×9. Additionally, KenKen grids are divided into heavily outlined groups of cells –– often called “cages” –– and the numbers in the cells of each cage must produce a certain “target” number when combined using a specified mathematical operation (either addition, subtraction, multiplication or division)

There is also a color based version.

Should be a good idea to find a way to generate some games with different level of difficulty.

Algebra

We need something to introduce algebra to children. We can have a look at DragonBox which has a good educational approach.

Step-by-step teaching of addition and subtraction

We could have an implementation of this game. Addition exercises can be solved using various strategies. The Number Catcher takes its player, step by step, from basic calculation up to adult strategies.

Pitch Recognition

Help students develop an ear for pitch by helping them notice differences between pitches (high vs. low, etc.) This is a very difficult activity for kids (and adults!) to master, so this activity will have to be very forgiving.

Intro to Music Theory

A beginner guide to the basics of music theory. Topics might include music notation, scales, chords, circle of fifths, etc.

"Montessori like" training exercises to learn decimal concept

We could implement a manipulation game aimed to represent numbers with hundreds, tens and unity representations. A good start to understand the concept is to look at the following app

Board game

Dominoes

Having a dominoes activity. It would be very nice, and maybe not too difficult to write (I don't speak for myself...) Easy levels could be with colors only, then images, medium level, images and dots, high level, only dots.

Nine Men's Morris

Nine Men's Morris is an abstract strategy board game for two players that emerged from the Roman Empire.[1] The game is also known as Nine Man Morris, Mill, Mills, Merels, Merelles, and Merrills in English.

This game is still very popular in some place of the world. Having this type of game in GCompris brings the opportunity to expose children to games they won't find otherwise. It would complete our board activity besides chess, oware, connect4, ... This idea has been proposed by Phanindra Ramesh Challa.

There are two open source implementation of this game : gnmm and morris.

Checkers

Checkers is a board game in the spirit of the chess game. It would be nice to have one beside our chess game.

Reading / Writing

Reference:

• In french an in detail program on how to teach reading to children. This is not specific to software but education in general but many activities could be declined from this: http://moncerveaualecole.com/quel-programme-lecture-en-primaire/

• Literacy for all in 100 days? A research-based strategy for fast progress in low-income countries (English) by Abadzi, Helen: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2013/05/18042078/literacy-all-100-days-research-based-strategy-fast-progress-low-income-countries

Image / Letter association

Its a classical in terms of learning letter, an image is presented to the children and he must click on the keyboard the starting letter of the image (like Apple = A). At this stage we don't check the case.

At the first stage of this activity, all our images with the voices are introduced to the children. He can see the associated image, word and letter and click on them to hear the letter and word spoken.

Case association

Add a new type of memory in our memory type activity in which the children is propose card with upper and lower case and he must associate them.

Dictation of letters

A set of letter is spoken, the children must write them in the correct order. As the level increase, there are more letters and the spoken delay between them decreases.

Dictation of words

A word is displayed and/or spoken the children must re-type it. Then the word is spelled letter by letter and the children must type it.

Letter in which word

A letter is written and/or spoken. Some words are displayed, the children must find the word or the words in which this letter appears.

Letter common to several words

Several words are displayed, the children must find the letter which is common to all of them.

Letter classification

The children is proposed a set of letter and an entry area. He must enter all the letters in the alphabetical order in the text area.

Text understanding

A text story is displayed, the children must read it. Once done, a number of questions about it are are asked. The texts may be simple and written by ourself or taken from public domain famous texts.

There are several levels depending on the text difficulty. Also at first the text and the questions are visible, then when the children has completed the reading the text disappears and the questions are asked.

Text with holes

A text story is displayed, the children must read it. Once done, another text, related to the first contains holes and must be filled by the children.

Ordering words to form a sentence

A sentence is proposed with the words shuffled. The children must put back the words in the correct order.

Add missing spaces in a sentence

A sentence is proposed in which spaces have been removed. The children must add then.

Phoneme

Like we have an activity to learn letters, we must have one to learn phonemes in each language.

We could make an activity in which a phoneme is spoken and the children must find the word which includes it from a list of words.

Exercise editor

An activity focused on grammar questions and reading. The idea is to provide a simple wiki like syntax to let a teacher propose this kind of exercise. For example one exercise could be: Where is the [little|big,red] cat (here the question is find the opposite. In [] are the answers to propose, the first one is the good one).

Language learning

A set of activities in the area of language learning. These activities should help a children learn or discover a foreign language. To achieve this, we can base this work on the shtooka project which provides a large set of recorded words.

We already have an in progress version of an activity dedicated to language learning. It is named _lang-activity_ and is organized in lessons having each a bunch of related sentences with their voices counterpart. When they are all presented to the children some exercises are proposed to help the children remember the sentences.

Target language

Extend GCompris core to include the concept of a target language for that this can be done from a single place. We currently have the ability to set a target language in some relevant activities, this must be changed to use the new target language facility.

Dictionary with word definition

In order to create reading, writing or language learning activities we need to have a well formatted list of words for each language. Some work has been done as seen in this page: Wiktionary_to_XML.

Reading time

We already have an activity to learn how to read on an analog clock. This could be enhanced to learn how to tell the time in a given language (like 10 past 4).

Adding support for digraph, trigraph based languages

At the moment, the system pulls the list of letters for letter games from a single line in the po where all letters are added in a row (abcdefghi...).

This works ok for languages which only use monographs (like a b c d e) or precomposed complex letters (like ď ť in Slovak) but it's problematic for languages which use di or trigraphs which are not precomposed (a digraph being a combination of two letters which is seen/treated as a single letter). This affects a lot of languages - even though not all potentially regard them as individual members of the alphabet (like German sch, English ch).

Nonetheless there are languages where these are handled rigidly as single units, such as Welsh ll, dd, ff or in our case (Scottish Gaelic) bh, ch, dh... and where the absence of a distinction between (for example) b (phonetically close to /b/ and bh (phonetically /v/) leaves a huge gap in the system.

We must extend GCompris to support this by adding delimiters between the letters in the po file, e.g. a|à|b|bh|c|ch.

Science

Light decomposition

One simple activity to show the major color components of the white light. One idea is to make a cloud that rains by clicking on it and a raising sun. It will create a rainbow. Maybe a zoom to each individual drop can be done in order to show the incoming white light and the major outgoing colored beams.

Plant growing simulator

The idea here if to let children take care of a virtual garden. The children have a garden and some plants in it. They must take care of it with actions like :

• seeding a specific plant with given caracteristics
• putting water on the plants when they need some
• get the fruits when ready
• ...

A camera simulator

Help the children understand the different concept used in photography, focal, focus, iso, ... We could let the children take a picture and simulate the rendering given the children's virtual camera settings.

Morse code

The morse code maybe a funny way to discover a lot of concepts. And it would be really fun to be able to discuss with Tux this way. It can be done in 2 side, Tux talks in morse and the children have the alphabet and must report the text. On the other side, the children write a message to Tux (it is a little bit more complex to implement).

Electricity

We have an electricity activity in the work which is a clone of the Gtk+ one electricity activity. It is dedicated to analog but we could have an electricity activity dedicated to digital.

In it there is no need to plug masses and we only manage a binary system on each wire. Each component defines some input and some output. An input can be wired to an output. The component by its logic set its output based on its input.

It provides high level components useful to discover the concept like:

• Power source
• Switch
• Pulse generator at variable frequency
• A LED.
• A 7 segments display. Could be used to introduce binary to children.
• A BCD to 7 segments converter
• A step by step motor (change the speed by changing the pulse generator frequency)

There can be a free play mode and one with a goal. For example we could ask the children to:

• bring a led to light
• bring a led to light through a switch
• set the number 9 on the 7 segments display

Other

Recording support for the animation

Let the children record her voice and to associate it to a given animation frame. i.e. a car moves along a picture of a road and create a voice over of "the car drove down the road".

Shape type activities

• Placing planets in our galaxy.
• Placing the wonders of the worlds on a world map.
• Children or adults wearing traditional clothes, they must be placed on a map.
• Typical food.
• Wearing a children

Photohunter

Our photohunter activity does not have enough levels.

How does the network works

A network is an interesting topic to expose to children.

For example we coud create an activity in which we see some computers (school.net, gcompris.net, mycomputer.local) and a switch on the screen with their services (ping and http). Then from a simulated console the children can enter commands like 'ping school.net' and the network packet moves over the wires. For a web page, we can see it on the disk of the computer school.net (the children can edit it), then the children can start a simulated browser and load http://school.net/mypage. In http mode, we see the GET request going out of the browser, to the web server, to the disk and back to the browser with the file attached. The services can be started/stopped by the children but to make the game fun they maybe stopped rendomly to let the children fix the network.

Networked activities

It would be nice to have some sort of educational network game that would involve a team competition, collaboration of sorts.

There brings different types of activities:

• Network quiz: The teacher would need to input a list of questions and answers beforehand. From that list the players on teams would try to answer the questions. That could be a fun type of review for science, math, history, etc.

• Each player must catch a ball and send it to another virtual player. Nobody must miss the ball or the team doesn't succeed.

• A multiplayer creative tool. Each player draw on the same canvas. They have to organize themselves to make a cute drawing.

Computer science

Block programming

A very interesting approach to software development with a blocky a block programming language or another approach with Robozzle.

Activities to make children understand the workflow by some small decision making constructs. such as [1].

• Maze activity inspired by [2]
• Bird activity [3]
• Turtle activity [4]