Raspberry Pi 4 - Kids - Educational Games

Raspberry Pi 4: Chronicling the Desktop Experience – Educational Games for Kids – Week 24

This is a weekly blog about the Raspberry Pi 4 (“RPI4”), the latest product in the popular Raspberry Pi range of computers.

With so many young children currently unable to follow their usual routine of going to school, playing with friends, and undertaking many hobbies, it’s vital to keep them happy and learning. There are many ways of advancing a child’s education and well-being including online lessons, video calls with family and friends, combined with parental guidance.

Younger children are likely to interact more with technology than they have ever done before during this crisis. There are lots of creative and educational ways to help them learn in a safe and balanced way. I’ve tested a range of software on my nephews and nieces (supervised by their parents), and the following games were the most popular. In these uncertain times parents need all the available help to support and offer education while children can’t be in school.


GCompris

Raspberry Pi 4 - GCompris
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GCompris is a high quality educational software suite, including a large number of activities for children aged 2 to 10. The suite is designed to be a unified interface to integrate more educational games.

GCompris proved to be the biggest hit with my eager band of testers. In part, this is because of the range of activities suitable for them. GCompris has a great range of learning activities, with many of the activities implemented well, although there are a few that offer very little educational value. The interface is beautifully designed, easy to navigate, and runs a charm on the RPI4.

The software is available in the Raspbian repositories. You get version 0.95, which is not the latest version. We’re missing out on a few activities, but with over 100 activities available in version 0.95, it’s nothing too serious.


Tux Paint

RPI4 - Tux Paint
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Art activities are always popular with young children. A lot of my early years I was armed with a crayon, paintbrush, and other drawing materials. There’s always the risk that my creative efforts didn’t end up on the paper, although I always avoided the walls. With Tux Paint there’s no risk of creating mess. It’s a simple drawing program designed to be fun and easy to use. There’s various drawing tools, brushes, rubber stamps, sound effects, and much more. A cartoon version of Tux, the Linux penguin, appears at the bottom offering helpful tips, hints and information.

Tux Paint is a really kid-friendly application. My testers thoroughly enjoyed playing with this program. Out of all the software, Tux Paint occupied their concentration the most.

The software is designed for children from 3 to 12 years.

Tux Paint is also available in the Raspbian repositories. We get version 0.9.23, which is the latest version.


eduActiv8

Raspberry Pi 4 - eduActiv8
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Like GCompris, eduActiv8 (formerly pySioGame) is a  collection of simple interactive educational activities designed with kids in mind.

eduActiv8 is suitable for children in the first six years of primary school but it’s also fun for pre-school kids with some parental guidance.

Activities introduce basic concepts of maths, language exercises, as well as logic games and memory training, and more. My testers really enjoyed playing the suite of games.

The Raspbian repositories host pySioGame, but not eduActiv8. Fortunately, eduActiv8 is easy to install, and doesn’t require any compiling.


KDE Education Project

Raspberry Pi 4 - KDE Education Project
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KDE Education Project is a collection of separate educational games. The focus of the project is for the 3-18 year olds.

Some of the applications held little interest for my target audience, as they are too young to enjoy them. But quite a few of the applications were very enjoyable, so this suite still held merit.

You only install one Raspbian package, but each application is allocated its own menu entry.


TuxMath

Raspberry Pi 4 - TuxMath
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TuxMath is an open source arcade-style video game for learning arithmetic. There’s solo and network play. There’s various levels of difficulty.

Users play the part of Commander Tux, as he defends his friends from an attack of maths equations. The game-play mechanic is based loosely on that of the arcade game Missile Command, but with comets falling on cities, rather than missiles. Like Missile Command, players attempt to protect their cities. The mission is to protect your penguin’s igloos from the maths problem “comets” that drop out of the sky.

My target audience never seem to enjoy their sums. But TuxMath certainly made a difference to their attention levels, although this was admittedly fairly brief.


Summary

Kids and RPI4? Definitely. There’s lots of good open source educational games for the RPI4. None of the software featured above taxes the tiny machine in any way. Light on CPU and memory usage. Even the 1GB model will have no issues.

There’s other educational games lurking in the Raspbian repositories. There should be enough fun games to keep children of primary school game occupied, having fun, and most importantly, learning at the same time.

You might have noticed I’ve not recommended any educational software that teaches kids how to use and program with a computer although there are activities in the featured software for computer discovery. Nor have I covered educational games for teenagers. Rest assured, I’ll be offering recommendations and feedback in later blog posts.


Read all my blog posts about the RPI4.

Raspberry Pi 4 Blog
Week 36Manage your personal collections on the RPI4
Week 35Survey of terminal emulators
Week 34Search the desktop with the latest version of Recoll
Week 33Personal Information Managers on the RPI4
Week 32Keep a diary with the RPI4
Week 31Process complex mathematical functions, plot 2D and 3D graphs with calculators
Week 30Internet radio on this tiny computer. A detailed survey of open source software
Week 29Professionally manage your photo collection with digiKam
Week 28Typeset beautifully with LyX
Week 27Software that teaches young people how to learn basic computing skills and beyond
Week 26Firefox revisited - Raspbian now offers a real alternative to Chromium
Week 25Turn the Raspberry Pi 4 into a low power writing machine
Week 24Keep the kids learning and having fun
Week 23Lots of choices to view images
Week 22Listening to podcasts on the RPI4
Week 21File management on the RPI4
Week 20Open Broadcaster Software (OBS Studio) on the RPI4
Week 19Keep up-to-date with these news aggregators
Week 18Web Browsers Again: Firefox
Week 17Retro gaming on the RPI4
Week 16Screen capturing with the RPI4
Week 15Emulate the Amiga, ZX Spectrum, and the Atari ST on the RPI4
Week 14Choose the right model of the RPI4 for your desktop needs
Week 13Using the RPI4 as a screencaster
Week 12Have fun reading comics on the RPI4 with YACReader, MComix, and more
Week 11Turn the RPI4 into a complete home theater
Week 10Watching locally stored video with VLC, OMXPlayer, and others
Week 9PDF viewing on the RPI4
Week 8Access the RPI4 remotely running GUI apps
Week 7e-book tools are put under the microscope
Week 6The office suite is the archetypal business software. LibreOffice is tested
Week 5Managing your email box with the RPI4
Week 4Web surfing on the RPI4 looking at Chromium, Vivaldi, Firefox, and Midori
Week 3Video streaming with Chromium & omxplayerGUI as well as streamlink
Week 2A survey of open source music players on the RPI4 including Tauon Music Box
Week 1An introduction to the world of the RPI4 looking at musikcube and PiPackages

This blog is written on the RPI4.

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