Educational
Games
Games can be educational as well. As we all know, having a game that also happens to be educational doesn't automatically eradicate the fun factor. In fact, one of my favorite Linux games just happens to be an educational game. (I tell you what it is shortly.)
KStars
KStars (command
name
,
kstars
), part of the
kdeedu
package, is a desktop planetarium program that displays the locations of stars and planets on your desktop. KStars is amazing fun but much more than a toy. With a database of all the planets, 130,000 stars, 13,000 deep-sky objects, and a few thousand near-Earth objects (
asteroids
, comets, etc.), KStars is an astronomical
treasure
. With it, you can visually identify the position of stars, galaxies, nebulae, and other glories of the night sky (see Figure 19-7). You can control what is displayed, zoom in on objects, and (I love this part) download images from online resources, such as Hubble and the Space Telescope Science Institute. Just right-click on an object of interest, and the pop-up will offer you both additional information and links to high-resolution images of those objects when appropriate.
When you start KStars, it will
open
the KStars Setup Wizard. You'll be asked to select your home location by choosing from a
fairly
extensive
list. When you find your location (which you can quickly narrow down by entering your city, state,
province
, or country), the longitude and latitude will be filled in for you (Figure 19-8).
When you click Next, KStars gives you the opportunity to download additional data for your catalog. This includes updated Messier object images, more NGC/IC catalog entries, planetary and
asteroid
data, and the like. This isn't something you have to do immediately. Clicking File on the menu bar and selecting Download data will restart this at a later time.
Explore. Learn. The universe is yours!
Learn to Type
In this day and age, learning to type is a life skill. From what I have seen, a foolproof voice recognition system is still some time off. For
years
, it has been my dream to be able to speak my thoughts and have them appear in my word processor or text editor, but I have seen nothing that works faster than just typing. What I'm saying is that everyone, including
kids
, should learn to type.
As part of the kdeedu package, you'll find software called
KTouch
(command name
ktouch
), a great little typing program. Besides being a nice typing tutor, KTouch looks great while doing the job. The display highlights which key to press as you go along, and the
color
coding
tells
you which finger to use (Figure 19-9). It supports multiple keyboard layouts, tracks your performance, and automatically changes levels based on that performance.
If the kids are particularly young, KTouch may not seem like a great deal of fun. Another way to get them into the spirit of learning is with a game called
TuxTyping
(Figure 19-10). This one isn't likely to be on your distribution disk, but head on over to the Web site and pick up a copy at http://tuxtype.sf.net.
TuxTyping features a pleasant musical soundtrack, friendly graphics,
colorful
background images, different game play, and multiple levels of increasing difficulty. Furthermore, when you complete a level, TuxTyping rewards you with applause that can be quite raucous at times. I particularly like waiting until the
letters
are almost at ground level before I let Tux go for them. It's great fun to see him run for it. Otherwise, he just lazily makes his way over to the fish. If you have kids and you want to teach them to type, get TuxTyping. They will love you for it.
That Potato Guy
I can't honestly say whether this qualifies as educational (although it does force you to use your
imagination
), but it does qualify as fun. What I am talking about here is Potato Guy (command name
ktuberling
), a computerized version of the potato-head game where you plug various plastic eyes, ears, noses, and hats into a plastic potato to create a
funny
-looking potato person (Figure 19-11). The
official
Mr. Potato Head is, of course, the famous
store-bought
version of this game, sold by Hasbro. I'm old enough to remember when the potato wasn't included with the game. You used a
real
potato.
As you add the various pieces to the potato guy, a friendly voice speaks out the
names
of those
parts
: "
Nose,
" "
Eye,
" "
Spectacles
." Change the playground (click Playground on the menu bar), and you can dress up Tux the penguin or create an aquarium scene in the same way.
Yes, I know it is a kid's game, but I have had a lot of fun with this simple
diversion
.
The Edutainment Pack
I'm going to wrap up this section on educational games by telling you a bit more about one of the packages that comprises KDE, the one called
kdeedu
. In it, you will find a scrambled word-guessing game called
KMessedWords
(command name
kmessedwords
), as well as
KHangMan
(command name
khangman
), another word-guessing game.
The package also contains some more advanced items, including KPercentage (command name
kpercentage
), a math testing game using (what else?) percentages; KGeo (command name
kgeo
), an interactive geometry program; and KAlzium (command name
kalzium
), an interactive periodic table of the elements with a Web lookup.
There is a quite a lot of work going on in this area. For more details (and to see what else is in the works), visit http://edu.kde.org.
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