Projects/Edu/KidsPlay

General ideas:

The goal of the project

This project aims to create free applications for young kids (less then 7 years old).

The application should be easy to grab from the web, placed on a CD or a USB stick and deployed. The application should reach homes with young kids and kindergartens as easy as possible.

The core  

All the application will be written as plugins. The core will search and load this plugin. This searching and loading should be fast and simple. We want the application to be easily extended.

The interface

The interface should be simple:

• no menus (kids can't read)

• no options dialog (or this should be hidden) maybe a separate application can be used to configure the apps.

• a way to block losing focus of the application (block clicking on the menus or starting some compiz/kde effect by moving the mouse on corners, block the moving/dragging of the window

The implementation

Should be simple. We should avoid using lots of  other libraries. The application should be easy to deploy cross platform (maybe only parts of it).  A good feature would be that it could run on other operating systems stand alone. Depending on KDE core should not stop us reach computers that do not have KDE but have kids who need software.

The application should remain simple as structure, do one thing and do it better and simple, no generalization (so if we have 2 ideas about a game with letters maybe it is better to make 2 games) if the code is simple (not containing 100 classes) it is easy for new coders to contribute

It would be nice that the plugin applications could run standalone, someone can download only one application or some of them, put them on a USB flash and setup them on different computers.

Deployment should be easy, maybe a package that can be just extracted, double click and all should work, this can be made for Linux too, downloading dependencies requires Internet access and administrative rights.

Applications we need:

• application for learning using the mouse (moving, clicking, double clicking, mouse over a picture discovers it,...)

• application for learning using the arrows keys

• application for learning counting (we have some code for this)

• application for learning the alphabet and learning reading (example: we have a cat picture the kids should chose letter c (cat begins with c) this should be made in such a way to be cross languages

• application for drawing and other application for coloring

• we should write some games with cars, boys love cars