Gcompris Activation Code Download
Sacha Weakland
Recently I installed the GCompris educational software suite on a friend's Linux laptop. While researching information about the application, I found out about Rudra Nil Basu, a young programmer from India, who has blogged about his contributions to GCompris. Based on his work, he was selected to be a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) participant and will receive a stipend to continue working to improve GCompris.
I recently had the opportunity to ask Rudra some questions about how he's translating his passion for game development into making learning fun for young children and supporting open source software and source code sharing. Some questions and answers have been lightly edited for clarity.
Rudra Nil Basu: I am a third-year computer science undergraduate from West Bengal, India. I was first introduced to programming about eight years ago and I've spent a large part of the last four years attending online and offline hackathons, making video games, contributing to open source projects, and hanging out with fellow programmers. All of these activities helped to increase my interest in computer science.
I came to know about open source during my freshman year while attending an open source event at my college. The idea of making the original source code freely available and allowing anyone to modify it fascinated me. I decided to delve deeper into it and started learning Git. I started out by making a few of my personal projects available for contribution while contributing to other larger projects, which turned out to be a great learning experience for me.
While looking for more exciting projects to work on, I came across KDE's GCompris and decided to work on it. The overwhelming support from the community allowed me to get familiar with the codebase in no time. I have continued contributing to Gcompris and applied for Google Summer of Code for my project.
RNB: My interest in game development played a huge role in getting interested in GCompris. While the technical aspects are an important part of developing a game, it is the design decisions that determine whether anyone plays it or not. GCompris is a project that focuses on making educational activities for children aged two to 10, and a lot of these activities are games. From a game designer's point of view, it is an interesting challenge, since a game has to be easy enough that children of the prescribed age can pick it up and find it easy to operate while maintaining the proper difficulty curve to make sure that they understand the concepts that are being taught. This challenge got me specifically interested in GCompris.
RNB: Besides the fact that GCompris challenges the game designer inside of me, another reason why I am specifically interested in this project is that in India we have a lot of quality discussions about how the education system can be improved to make learning much more fun for children. One way is to provide practical demonstrations of what they are being taught, which unfortunately is not always feasible in the real world. That is where simulations come into play. A lot of the activities in GCompris are simulations of real-world problems that the users can relate to in real life.
RNB: Sure. Currently, I am working on an ordering activity, which is aimed at teaching children about arranging numbers and letters in ascending and descending order. Post GSoC, I want to create a much more generic version of it, which will be aimed at teaching children to order items by their length, area, or weight, making sure we don't restrict the activity to just numbers and alphabets.
RNB: That is quite a tough question that I have been thinking a lot about lately. I will be sticking with open source in the future for sure. I would also love to convert game development from a hobby to my profession. Here, game development is not taken as seriously compared to other professions, and I would like to change that.
RNB: I would like to thank my mentors and my family members for the incredible support they have provided me; without them, none of these things would have been possible. It will be one of the most exciting summers in my experience, if not the most exciting summer, and I am looking forward to it.
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We decided again for this release to keep the translations that dropped below 80%. It would be sad to have to disable 10 languages from the application, but if no one updates the following translations, they will be disabled in next release: Basque, Belarusian, Chinese Simplified, Estonian, Hindi, Russian, Scottish Gaelic, Slovak, Slovenian and Turkish.
For the windows version, we added a new entry in the start menu called GCompris (Safe Mode) to launch it with software rendering mode. This was needed as the auto-detection of OpenGL support was not reliable. Now, users can easily choose between OpenGL and software rendering without changing the configuration file.
The last version of GCompris for OSX was 0.52 from 3 years ago. Since then, no one in the team could update it because of the lack of hardware. Thanks to Boudewijn from the Krita Foundation, we have now a little mac mini, old but good enough to build our packages. It took me several days of dedicated work to learn this new platform and update the build system to produce a distributable package.
Notes: this package is based on GCompris version 0.95. It is built with the latest version of Qt (5.12.0) which introduced some regressions. We fixed all of those issues, but some of those fixes are only in the development version for now. A few activities are broken (checkers, braille, braille_alphabet, algorithm), but we will make a new release next month that will also address those little issues.
Usually we only ship translations that are at least 80% complete. However for this release, several translations dropped below 80%. We decided to keep them exceptionally for this release, and hope to see former or new translators complete those translations. If we get updates or new translations, we will make a release update for those.
So if your language is in the partially supported list, or is not yet supported at all, and you want to help, please contact us and we will give you instructions to get started translating.
This is a good way to make it more visible and easy to find for new users. Also, if you buy GCompris from the Windows Store, you get automatic updates, you can install it easily on all your Windows systems, and it will run in a sandbox.
If you prefer to not use the store, or if you only want the free demo version, you can still download it from our Download page, and buy the activation code to unlock all the activities. The store is just one more way to distribute GCompris, and to provide some income to support the project.
As usual, the full version is free on Free-Software operating systems like GNU/Linux, but for proprietary operating systems like Windows, the full version has a cost. Of course, the source code of GCompris is and will always be under a Free-Software license.
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As I write this, my youngest son is 11 years old. He has grown up in amagical world of electronics that delivers what he wants to watch when hewants to watch it. Access to the web is something he always has known. Untilvery recently, he never had seen television with commercials. A coupleyears ago, my wife and I thought it was something he should at leastunderstand, so we turned to a live TV program for the first time in I don'tknow how long. He was not impressed with the interruptions. Now, withmultiple Google Home units in the house, including one in his bedroom, theon-demand magic is pretty much complete.
He started playing video games when he was three and was scary good on myPS3 by the time he turned four. He started using a laptop when he was five,and that laptop ran Linux. I'm pretty sure he was using Kubuntu, but itmight have been Linux Mint. Either way, it was a KDE Plasma desktop. Inshort, the world of tech is nothing new for him, and Linux is just whatpeople run. His school has Chromebooks, and the few run-ins he's had withWindows left him cold.
Much earlier on, however, I took advantage of some of the simplereducational games available on Linux. One of my favorites is GCompris, anall-in-one collection of educational games for children, geared for agestwo to ten (Figure 1). By the way, GCompris is pronounced like theFrench words, J'ai compris, and it literally means, "I haveunderstood", paying homage to its educational focus. I've mentionedthis one in the past, but GCompris is a living, breathing project, activelydeveloped by the KDE community with a new release just this past month.
When you start GCompris for the first time, it asks you for thelanguage in which you wish to work. Along the top, an icon bar with animalcharacters provides a list of categories, such as reading, math, amusements,puzzles, computer skills, discovery activities and more. Clicking on any ofthose choices causes a list of related games or activities, also withcolorful icons, to be displayed below. There can be quite a few activitiesper category, so you may need to scroll up and down to see them all. GCompris comes with more than 100 different activities,making it a must for your young penguinista.
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