Educational software

Playing is an important activity for children and for young children is the main activity. I have a 5 years old son(at this moment 2011) and i started writing small educational software for him. I am member in the KDE-EDU community where I proposed some of my ideas but unfortunately we do not had time to implement them. My games are open source under GPL so anyone can use them for free and also modify them and improve them(with the obligation 'to give back the improvements they made).You can find the source code and some binaries on source forge under the name Play and Learn at the link http://sourceforge.net/projects/playlearn/ All those games are programmed in c++ using the Qt toolkit.

My wife is an artist and she made some of the artwork,the other work was taken from sites like http://openclipart.org where the artwork is free to use in free and commercial projects. Lately my wife works on some themes for a pairs educational game, here are some of the images she created, we prefer SVG since we can scale them at any size and we can later convert them to png or jpeg or any other format.

The first game was the coloring game. This was the first game my son played,it teaches how to use the mouse and how to point and click at a specific location. Other skis the child will learn is to colors, to name them and to associate a color to an object, grass is green, sky is blue ... I am planing to improve this game in the future to add support for SVG files.

The counting game was created for aid in learning to count objects and learn the numbers. At start you chose a maximum number, so if the child is young you can start with learning numbers less then 4 or 5. After that images will appear ,each image contains a number of objects and the child must press the button corresponding to the number of objects in the image.

Next software is used to present a question and some variants of answers. So i wanted to create a generic application and all the questions will be loaded from XML files. I identified the following types of questions/answers:

text, the questions/answers are presented as text
image images are presented
sound we use audio files to represent the question/answer
TTS text to speech will be used to speck the questions(answers)

I have not implemented the TTS part yet. Here are some pictures:

The memory game is the game that presents a board with tiles, on the back of the tiles are some images, each image is present to times, and the goal is to pair them. After flipping two tiles, if the images are the same you won one point and that pair is made invisible, if the images are not the same the tiles are flipped back. This game trains your visual memory.

Future plans

This is a list of games that I would like to implement, the only problem is that I made them in my free time and my free time is few and I have to spend time with my family too

puzzle game,I refer to the game where we begin with a images splitted in small parts and the player must reconstruct the original image
Fifteen puzzle, is a more difficult puzzle game, this game it starts with a square image that is splited in smaller squares and shuffles , one square is missing so let's the player move the squares around, it is a difficult game, so is for older children
IQ like game, you are presented with a number of images and you must find the element that is not matching the others or in other version an element is missing and you have a list of answers to chose the one that is matching