Introducing G-compris: A gift for your child

Any app-space or software repository today, is full of games of various shades and types, mostly aimed at children. Game market is a huge business with fancy multimedia, sound effects, increasingly realistic imagery, and what not. There are many free resources and paid resources in this pool. I am sure as a parent, you have already got a few games for your children, and often they may demand their own which you end up downloading or buying. Video games involving shooting, violence, attacks, etc though very popular among children, are certainly not doing any good to the players, except occupying their time, and perhaps corrupting their mind. There is much concern about this trend among educationists too.

One reason for this state is not being aware of good resources which can hold a child’s attention and be useful in some way. And if it is also a free resource? G-compris is one such beauty, which is worth exploring and gifting to your child from 3 years to 10+ years. Simply put, it is a collection of about 140 games of many different genre, and difficulty. They are almost all educational.

Most of the games in it are very simple to understand and very focussed in what they are targeting. Not much unnecessary bells and whistles, to distract children. Being a children’s game, there is a background music everywhere, which can be switched off, if you don’t like. And they are all visual games, suitable for children. There are audio cues and directions almost everywhere. The feedback is also friendly, not overdone. It chooses from a small set like “congratulations”, “way to go”, “super”, “awesome”, “great”, etc to reduce monotonic feedback and if you get it wrong, it gives you “check your answer”. No singing and dancing, and no distracting display. A visual smiley or image also goes along. This works well with kids.

Each game has multiple levels, with increasing complexity/difficulty. But levels are not restricted; and if you like you can start anywhere in any order. Call it a good feature or bad feature, as you like. You automatically go up in level, once you score a certain points or complete a certain number of games in a level.

Let us now take a look into what is inside G-compris. The next few sections cover the various sections of games as organised in G-compris.

Discover the computer

Being a pack of computer games, some familiarity with computers is needed for any game. It is often difficult to get a little one to learn how to click, double click, move your mouse, drag and drop, or type a key. One set of lessons titled “Discover the computer” attends to these. The simplest one shows a picture of an animal with a set of opaque blocks overlaying the image. As you move the mouse over each block, they disappear revealing the picture. Then another similar game requires you to click on each block, and the next one requires a double click on each. Some initial difficulties perhaps, but kids get used to it in the anxiety of discovering the picture. With these you get comfortable operating the mouse. Another game requires you to drag the mouse along the outlines of a pipeline to get the water come out, making you comfortable moving the mouse. Another mouse game is to click a set of moving fishes before they disappear from the screen. Every fish clicked earns you a point.

With keyboard also there are a bunch of games, but you need to have a feel of the alphabets or numbers. So open this set only after the child begins a feel of various characters; no need for read/write skills, just a feel. Often, the child will be motivated to read/write through games like these. One simple game is to press the key corresponding to falling letters, before the letter hits the bottom. For numbers, there is a dice falling game, showing a random face, and you need to type the number before the dice hits the bottom. There are a few more, but you get the idea.

Discovery activities

These are a set of exploratory activities spanning a wide range of skills. The set includes the following. This is possibly the largest group in the set.

• A nice set of activities on colour including mixing the right amount of red/green/blue to get a shown colour, rebuilding a mosaic of colours picking from a given pool, and identifying a specified (by name) colour from a list of shown colours.
• A set of maze games, requiring to find the way out.
• a set of games on Braille letters more as detecting and matching patterns, where you click a subset of the 6 circles forming the Braille template, given a letter like ‘F’, ‘I’, etc.
• A nice set of memory games asking you to match pictures, sounds, music notes, etc. A set of items are shown without any clue, and you explore each and click matching pairs together. One nice game shows you a sequence of railway engine blocks (carrying passengers, coal, oil, steel, etc) for a few seconds and asks you to reconstruct the sequence from a pool of such blocks.
• A set of matching games, including putting pieces of a picture together based on shape of pieces cut, based on continuity of picture contents, etc. One game asks you to arrange a set of pictures depicting different stages of a process to be put in the right order.
• A nice game is on familarising with the left and right hand, identifying a hand image as belonging to left hand or right hand: direct, backside, different orientation, etc
• A beautiful set of games is on geometry with pattern. Continents of the world, States of India, countries of continents, States/districts of countries, etc are to be put in their right place on map, primarily using their shape. Kids learn place names, and start a getting a feel for positions of things.
• There is also a clock game, asking you to drag the minute and hour hand to given time (e.g. 02.30).
• A set of games on music notes asking you to identify notes, and make music using simple notes.

More to come

Experiment activities: Here there is a set of (mostly) science activities like keeping a satellite in orbit adjusting its velocity; getting a rocket to land safely controlling its position and velocity; landing a parachute safely; forming simple electric circuits wiring a bulb, battery, resistance, ammeter, etc; and so on. The electric circuit game uses a simulator to check if your connections are proper and shows the light burning with the right intensity as per the current flow. These can be useful to instil some science into your kid, though you dont need much science background to play it.

Amusement activities: These are more in the nature of games. Identify gold by zooming in and out with your mouse, a tool to take notes (a mini word processor), Tux paint, getting a ball into goal post by clicking at the right place, and an animation maker can be found here. The tux paint and animator are worth elaborating on, and I will do in the next section.

Mathematics: G-compris has a great set of activities to make maths fun. Balancing an item by putting the right amount of weight on one side, given a set of numbers and another target number, derive the target from the given set using an appropriate set of operators, hitting a dart under different wind velocity and distance, etc are in the calculation segment. There is also a good set of things on Geometry. A set on numbers include counting items, getting the sum of two dice, enumeration, subtraction, make a picture by connecting dots in their numeric order, catch numerals in order using a helicopter, etc. The collection is good and games are fairly intuitive.

Reading: These games help recognising words, and building vocabulary. They span common words including body parts, action words, etc, and cover pronunciation (hearing, not speaking) and recognition.

Puzzle games cover common puzzles like tower of Hanoi and its adaptations, picture matching to recognise the parts of a given picture, sudoku, 15-puzzle, switch off lights, etc.

Strategy games are more advanced and include chess, connect-4, oware, etc.

My list of games in each section are not exhaustive. Against 140, I have listed altogether about 50 only. And for a few, I may have got the section wrong. But overall picture is right.

Tux paint and animation

Tuxpaint is essentially a paint utility. But what makes it interesting is that it is very child friendly. No fancy operations, and no sub-menus. Supports different brush types (an amazing range in fact including images like star, shapes, etc), a range of predefined pictures of birds, flowers and other useful images which you can insert like a stamp, and a palette of colours. There is a simple undo if you make mistakes, but no “redo”!. A set of background images are provided to start your painting. Visual and auditory guidance on what you select. For example, if you select a frog to insert, you will hear the sound of a frog. A nice set of primitives to alter your pictures like blur, etc.

The animation is also a paint utility, but not as rich in paint options. Instead it gives you a timeline of about 50 units at the bottom of the screen. You can click a time point and do something on the screen, click next time point and alter it a small amount. Do this for the 50 slots, and you can play it like a movie. You can play it fast or slow. Decent options to insert a set of predefined images like a house, vehicles, flowers etc are possible, and to change their size or position. This is what usually leads to an animation – you can have a square growing in size and then shrinking, or an animal moving from one place to another.

Conclusion

I installed G-compris on my Linux desktop at home, and my daughter started exploring it when she was about 3 years. Today she is comfortable handling the computer right from switch on and getting to the game, and plays a number of games. A lot of games are still out of reach for her at 4.5 years, but help to build curiosity when she ventures into them. She enjoys it quite a bit. She ventures and explores on her own too, with a call “amma, ithenta?” (mom, what is this?), or “ache, ithu kuthatte?” (dad, shall I click on this?). So, from my experience, I can recommend this to anyone. I think Windows and Mac version are available, but never tried them. It works beautifully on Linux and is a free download through your software centre of the Linux. A beautiful gift for your kid, which can interest her for many years, as she discovers and becomes comfortable with game after game. I, of course, would not advise you to keep the child engaged to a computer for long hours, no matter how great the computer application. They need to get out of the computer and enjoy other physical games, and the rest of (real) life.

One problem with G-compris is that it lacks guidance on what games to choose for a kid. It is up to you to choose games which works for your kid depending on complexity and aptitude. And to some extent you can let the child wander on its own, but watch for frustration on attempting some game which requires background which he/she does not have. Since the games are independent, and sometimes are totally different packages linked together, there is no attempt to make a student model keeping track of what you did and what you scored. Every time you open G-compris, you start afresh. You can again, argue, on both sides for this decision.

And why only the child? Even you may enjoy some of the games. Get the child in you come out.... Your playing can inspire the child too, and at times lead to a bitter fight for the computer.

Enjoy...