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I was looking for free educational software for a Church's day care center. I looked at several sites, I saw LibreOffice.org is listed under Education Software / Mathematics on the SchoolForce.net web site.
https://schoolforge.net/education-software/mathematics
I am looking for good offline and free educational software for kids under 13 years of age.
Spreadsheets (LibreOffice Calc) are confusing even to those who are comfortable with algebra. The notation is clumsy! I wouldn't think
that is something that should be inflicted upon kids under 13!
That said, Calc, as any other spreadsheet, can do all the "basic" math functions--add, subtract, multiply, divide. It can do calendar functions,
and of course, monetary functions like percentage.
To me, it would make more sense to teach beginning programming, using a language like Python. Programming languages can do math also,
of course, but they have so much other capability, and the modern digital world virtually demands some understanding of programming.
(Back in the "dark ages" of the 70s or so, kids learned BASIC on Commodore and Amiga computers. Real programmers hated BASIC,
but you could do a lot with it, in spite of the professionals' disdain. Unfortunately, the "easy" BASIC of those days is gone now, and its
modern descendants require the user to create "visual" inputs and outputs and work in GUI environments. Phooey!
Just my 2¢ --doug
Hi,
webmaster-Kracked_P_P schrieb:
I was looking for free educational software for a Church's day care
center. I looked at several sites, I saw LibreOffice.org is listed under
Education Software / Mathematics on the SchoolForce.net web site.
You should install the extension dmaths in addition.
I am looking for good offline and free educational software for kids
under 13 years of age.
very nice mathematical things are in http://www.mathematische-basteleien.de/index.htm. But they are mixed over all grades and you have to store the sites locally when you need it offline.
Kind regards
Regina
Hi 
I think Edubuntu might be worth trying out?
http://www.edubuntu.org/
(sorry e-letter!)
Perhaps test-drive a LiveCd? Even tho it 'should' be about 100 times slower than a proper dual-boot install onto a normal ide hard-drive, even bigger difference with sata and vast difference with SSDs of course but assuming you are using Windows on a normal ide hard-drive then a LiveCd 'should' seem about 100 times slower. In fact it generally feels tons faster purely because of Gnu&Linux power :)
Regards from
Tom
Hi
Dohhh!! Just realised the op uses Gnu&Linux already! lol
Regards from
Tom
I think that it is not true for ooBasic.
I have a friend that never had contact with computer programming. At end of
last year I told him about how to create new functions in Calc not entering
in details, just telling this as curiousity.
Now he is able to create complex functions in basic by himself.
By the way, in last 6 months I spent no more than 1 day teaching him.
regards
Alex Mitsio Sato
Hi Tim,
GCompris on Linux is a wonderful educational program that works in many languages and has over 100 activities. It is made for free on Linux and if you want it on Windows, you have to pay a fee. I have used it in a school Library setting with a network of 8 Linux computers and even our Special Education department would have our special ed. kids come and work with GCompris[1]. TuxPaint is also a terrific programme that students love, it is a clone of KidPix and is totally free[2]. Both of these are often used in school settings (especially TuxPaint).
Cheers,
Marc
Hi Doug,
Spreadsheets (LibreOffice Calc) are confusing even to those who are
comfortable with algebra. The notation is clumsy! I wouldn't think
that is something that should be inflicted upon kids under 13!
In our school, we teach:
MSWord -- starting in grade 4
PowerPoint -- starting in grade 5
Excel -- starting in grade 7
There is no reason to get kids to work with spreadsheets even as early as grade 6 (11 yrs of age) in a school setting. They are ready for this and do quite well. In fact many math text books will have for assignments work that is asked to be represented inside a spreadsheet. This is quite common in math studies, and, at the elementary school level. Whether or not these are undertaken rests on the ability of the classroom instructor.
LibreOffice in this context makes for a great learning tool.
Also,
I also usually am part of a teacher-team for lego robotics and we start training our kids who join the lego-club as of grade 4 (9 yrs of age), we also join competitions with the kids after less than 6 months of working with the robotics kits (even if this is a very simple programming language). It give enough experience at basic programming to get them interested in perhaps going further in highschool
I also taught logo programming to kids as of grade 4 through 8 in a "school club" setting, and by the end of grade 8, students were able to do self-programmed "slideshows" and one team even created their own font and had the alphabet run through their font as a slideshow with letter flying around their screen.
I have also taught logo to a grade 2 class over the span of a year with a lot of success. The kids loved it.
There is normally a long waiting list to get into the clubs and some teachers hoping to help even have to wait to join for lack of hardware. The clubs are very popular.
Kids are awesome learning sponges!
Cheers,
Marc
Thanx for the input, Marc. As an engineer (now retired) I always found ways NOT to use a spreadsheet unless it was some kind of
scheduling or accounting problem. There are so many math programs that treat math like you would write it on paper. But I suppose if
you are taught from the cradle, as it were, to use Excel you will be used to it.
Logo! I haven't heard that word in thirty years, at least! I'm surprised it's still around. Never really got into it, but it seemed like fun,
at least from a distance. I started using BASIC, and then learned and used Pascal. Not being (professionally) a programmer, I never
learned C.
--doug
Hi Doug,
Logo! I haven't heard that word in thirty years, at least! I'm surprised
it's still around. Never really got into it, but it seemed like fun,
at least from a distance. I started using BASIC, and then learned and
used Pascal. Not being (professionally) a programmer, I never
learned C.--doug
OK, I'm dating myself here, but, I was taught at the very last year at my university where "punch cards" were still being used, and I used to chat on beasts that spewed paper instead of drawing on monitors, way back in 1976. I studied FORTRAN in 1980 so that I could be with the up-and-coming in-crowd on campus ... only to find out that they all switched that year to COBOL, DOH!
Yup, Logo is still cool to play with. I used FMSLogo because it played nicely with my computer lab of Mandriva Linux boxes. I even taught Logo on ICON computers by Unisys Corp. that used QNX as its operating system. QNX is what powers the new Blackberries from RIM! Finally, when the ICONs were being replaced, I installed AtariGEM on them and used the Atari version of Logo. It was a lot of fun! I was always accused of having more fun than the kids!
Cheers,
Marc
Ah, memories... Standing in line because the reader did nor detect the pencil marks properly. My first program - write a program that calculated the distance between two points on earth using their latitude and longitude.
In the same year, I was introduced to a PC1 {http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f1/Ibm_pc_5150.jpg/250px-Ibm_pc_5150.jpg} with Ashton Tate's dbase II on it! Green letters on a nearly black screen. I still have a pang of nostalgia when hearing the whir of the hard drive as it takes 1-2 minutes to boot up. The start of the serverless revolution!
And Marc,
QNX was developed by Gordon Brown the genius engineer of DEC who developed the real-time systems (QNX is a real-time OS) like DEC-Lab etc!
Oh, the good old times when programmers new what real-time programming meant and rotating buffers were necessary to get speed and be really efficient with memory! Current programmers have no idea how to use a computer efficiently!!
(The rantings of an old man!)
Joep
Hi Simon,
In the same year, I was introduced to a PC1
{http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f1/Ibm_pc_5150.jpg/250px-Ibm_pc_5150.jpg}
with Ashton Tate's dbase II on it! Green letters on a nearly black
screen. I still have a pang of nostalgia when hearing the whir of the
hard drive as it takes 1-2 minutes to boot up. The start of the
serverless revolution!
Hey! I wrote my own accounting system using AtariST's DbMan (an Ashton Tate dBaseIII clone). It worked great! I still have an AtariSTE in a box with an old RLL 30 meg drive and 12 inch monitor.
Cheers,
Marc
Now now! Don't forget we used to rant a lot about our 16Mghz speedsters of computers, hand-held scanners ...
Marc
Hi
Lol, it is ironic that this whole 'new Cloud' thing is exactly what people worked hard to get away from just a decade or 2 ago!! Lol
Regards from
Tom
Marc Paré wrote:
OK, I'm dating myself here, but, I was taught at the very last year at my university where "punch cards" were still being used, and I used to chat on beasts that spewed paper instead of drawing on monitors, way back in 1976. I studied FORTRAN in 1980 so that I could be with the up-and-coming in-crowd on campus ... only to find out that they all switched that year to COBOL, DOH!
My first exposure was Fortran, in Gr. 12, where we used pencil mark cards. I then later had courses on BASIC, Pascal, Fortran and C. I also learned a bit of BASIC on my own and assembly language on the 8080, 6502, 6809 & 8088 microprocessors and Data General Nova & Eclipse mini-computers.
Hi
Lol, it is ironic that this whole 'new Cloud' thing is exactly what people worked hard to get away from just a decade or 2 ago!! Lol
Regards from
Tom
+1
This trip down memory lane makes one feeil old. Anyone remember
teletypes with punched tape?
________________________________
Jay Lozier wrote:
This trip down memory lane makes one feeil old. Anyone remember
teletypes with punched tape?
Many years ago, I was a bench tech and spent my days overhauling them. I later bought a Teletype M35 ASR, as surplus from my employer, which I connected to my IMSAI 8080.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSAI_8080
BTW, I also have a core memory plane, which was salvaged from a Collins 8500B computer.
