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.

Currently our biggest weakness are in the area of music, reading/writing and language.

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

In that activity, we could add :

- filling incomplete tables - choosing the right heading for rows and columns of an already filled-in table

Interactive geometry

Like Dr.Geo 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.

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. Here is an online example.

Music

Musical notation introduction

A la "Rosegarden" - with more simple features, just drag n' drop notes on a score and hit play button.

Melody recognition

The computer plays a melody and the children must replay it on a virtual keyboard.

Board game

TicTacToe and variations

Here some ideas to steal. TicTacToe and others variants of same game (QuinzeVainc, Sentier, Mots and Lettres].

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

Matching Letters

A game (perhaps like a memory 'turn over the cards') that has the UPPER case letters and lower case letters within it. (then the child gets to match A=a and the like).

It could also be a falling letter type of thing (if it's easier).

My keyboard is a CAPS one and my daughter is learing lower case. Suffice to say she doesn't 'get' the keyboard fully.

A 'level-up' would be to have one (or both) of the fonts being Cursive (or some other form of elaborate script)

Writing

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

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.

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).

Science

Environment protection section

We can make a new section aimed to introduce children to environment care. Some ideas of activities are:

• Garbage classification (Level 1: Organic and inorganic; high level: Organic, glass, metal, wood, danger garbage, etc)
• Water cycle (already done!)
• Simple oxygen cycle
• Saving power. To mark which activities save energy and which ones do not.
• Global warming. To mark which activities are good and which ones are not.

Primary light colors

The child will control the intensity of three colored beams that are to be projected to a wall. The controls should only have fixed posible levels, which its number according to the activity level. The user should generated a shown colour by manipulating the three controls.

Light decomposition

One simple activity for show the seven color components of the white light. One idea is to make a cloud rained by click and the sun rise in the same way. So, and rainbow will appear. Maybe a zoom to one individual drop can be done in order to show the incoming white light and the seven 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).

Braille

The Braille system is a method that is widely used by blind people to read and write, and was the first digital form of writing. In this activity, Tux is blind and you must talk to him in Braille. Also Tux writes to the children in braille and he must spell it and writes what he founds so the computer can check.