Educational Software for Ages 6-12 on Unix?

MarkB asks "I have an autistic five year old boy who is mad keen on maths, music and drawing. His school want him to have his own computer. I would like to start him on UNIX (rather than MS which the school offers) but need to find educational software suitable for young children. What software is available or being developed for the six to twelve age group? I am happy to join a project and get my hands dirty (java)."

Software....

[Crewd]

Of course first of all, *nix is an educational program all in itself. Besides that, check out the software at linuxberg.com ....I did a quick check and there was some educational software listed for KDE and Gnome....

phht!

[j_d]

Back in MY day, there was ONLY ONE educational program for Unix, and that was MAN! and back in them days, we didn't have no man pages written by fancy schmancy programmers, we just had a buncha rumors and advice like "watch out for that -r option, she's a tricky 'un! She'll say she loves ya, but then, BAM! Yer out in the street with nothing but bitterness and broken inodes."
pfah!

gcc

[SIGFPE]

Educational software for Unix...gcc.

I'm not sure about at 6 years old but starting at about 10 (or maybe earlier) I'd suggest gcc. I guess when I was a kid we had BASIC but I was doing assembler within 6 months of BASIC so if this kid really is into maths at 5, C before 10 should be a breeze. You need a nice easy API though - I'd have gone crazy if I had to use X or Win32 directly at that age. I feel like programming has become harder and harder over the years as the brain cells die off. Start 'em young!

Before 10 (maybe 6 but I certainly would have had trouble at that age) I'd suggest Logo. There are a few free implementations for X out there. It's a nice clean language with much of the power of Lisp and it's dead easy to produce pretty graphics.

--

SEUL/edu

[Lancer]

You might find the following site useful:

http://www.seul.org/edu/ [seul.org]

The focus is on using Linux in education at all levels, K-College, both in the classroom as well as administration.

Hope this helps!

Linux for Kids

[SEWilco]

• LinuxForKids.Org [linuxforkids.org]
• Using Linux to Teach Kids How to Program [linuxgazette.com]. It's good Logic practice.

Way too far...

[tritiumsys]

Ok, now this is taking it WAY TOO FAR. It's like teaching me how to fly a plane in a fully loaded 747. I can not say that Windoze hurt me at all. I started on a PC, and now I am running the full suite of Internet server software (Apache, Bind, Sendmail, PHP, MySQL, etc.) on Sun SPARC's and Solaris. By giving me a solid base to learn from, Windows helped me greatly. I learned the fundamentals of programming, designing software, trouble-shooting, and all the other skills that make me an efficient computer user. In addition, I am a 'master' at the most popular OS in the world, which cant possibly help me when I go try to get a job. When my Sun boxes serve up web sites, who do they serve them to? Windows clients. In summary, you cant shove someone out of an airplane and expect them to weave their own parachute on the way down. Yeah, that sounds cool. # /dev/null

Any Java program...

[Spoing]

...well, almost any! If you go to a site that doesn't have it available for download, you can probably view the source and still figure out how to get it.

Surprized nobody mentioned the obvious.

[bluGill]

Wine [winehq.com] allows you to run windows programs on linux. It is getting better every day, and who knows it might even run a program you want.

If it doesn't work, make it work.

Yes you can start from scratch and write you own educational program. If you have the time, please do. Might I suggest a generic game engine that can be used to write Myst like games for linux. It appears to me that most educational games a based on Myst on the high level, (but with a lot more things to click on, and more obvious solutions) with sub games. Let an artist make the game screens and play. This allows linux to get many educational games once you get your engine working.

Teach him to program.

[sbaker]

Someone with intelligence and math, art and music skills should be a natural games programmer. My son (who is not autistic - but who has the same range of interests) started at age 7yrs to make 3D models, paint images and such for the 3D games I write. He's now 9 and is already getting into programming.

Perhaps 5 is a little young for programming - but packages like GIMP, Xpaint, Blender and AC3D are well within the abilities of a 5 year old...and if he can make the artwork and you can bring them to life, then that's a special kind of magic between parent and child.

If you can program (or learn) then you and he can form a lasting bond as collaborators in this way.

That's certainly worked well for my son and I. You can see the results at http://tuxaqfh.sourceforge.net and http://tuxkart.sourceforge.net