Free educational computer programs for Children

barneysplash

Hi all

Does anyone know of any good free computer programs suitable for children?

I am doing a laptop preparation job for a friend, who got their child a laptop for Christmas,
and does not want them just playing games on it.

These programs must be free and should be easy to use.

Good educational programs with painting/drawing, music or learning would be a good start.


I will start with the ones I know about :

Type Faster is a good freeware typing program that teaches touch typing.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/typefaster/



Pivot Stickfigure Animation : This is a program that lets you
make simple animations using a point and click vertsion of the
flickbooks we used to have years ago.

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/stickfigure.html



Tux Paint is a drawing and painting program.

http://www.tuxpaint.org/download/windows/

The link to download the program is in the bottom right of this page.

woolymammoth

makeuseof.com is a great site for useful software and other sites.

http://www.makeuseof.com/.../search/

barneysplash

Thanks for posting, but I wouldn't recommend that site.

It looks like a real "click here for our SUPER free guide to ... "
site that gets revenue from the amount of links you click.

Any site that makes you register your e-mail with them before seeing content is
not worth recommending. They usually want your e-mail address
so they can sell it to marketing sites to send you spam mail.

Websites are good, but I'd prefer to make a list of applications
and tools that you don't need an internet connection to access.


The American Libraby Association has a list of approved sites for kids:

http://www.ala.org/greatsites

woolymammoth

barneysplash wrote: »

Any site that makes you register your e-mail with them before seeing content is
not worth recommending. They usually want your e-mail address
so they can sell it to marketing sites to send you spam mail.

thanks for posting your intelligence level.

i'm sorry, did you even look at the site i posted, open one of the search links, and read one of the articles, with non-revenue generated links to actual unaffiliated websites? Did you get scared by the big bad optional Subscribe banner at the top of the page!? Cry me a river. Try looking into something next time before you judge it on the adds that keep it free. As in, you do not have to register your email address, free. Free articles and reviews of other sites, free reviews of games, for kids. If you bothered to look, i'm sure you could find some that were offline!

barneysplash

My friend has asked me not to allow internet access on the laptop.

So I thought I'd use an encyclopedia so that her child can learn how
to use internet-surfing skills i.e. using hypertext, navigating between
articles etc.

I found that the online Encyclopedia, Wikipedia has a version that can be
downloaded for use offline. This was developed for use in schools that
have computers but do not have access to the internet, especially in
poorer countries. It is also used in schools in the UK, and is based on the UK
school's curriculum for pupils aged 8 - 17 years.

I've written a quick guide below, and there are instructions on the Wikipedia page
also.

To download the encyclopedia you have to use a program called Bit Torrent.
This is a program that lets people share large files over the internet.
It is a bit technical to do the download, so ask any computer nerds you know
for help

What you have to do is to download a small file called a torrent.
This is like table of contents for the main file.
This main file is a single file containing all the pages and pictures that are in the encyclopedia.
This is called an archive or zip file. It is called a zip file because all
the files are squeezed down and "zipped" into a single container.

To download the main file, you have to load the torrent file into a program called a client.
This program then uses your internet connection to find and download all the parts of the archive.

The most popular torrent client is called μtorrent, pronounced micro-torrent
as the μ is the Greek letter for micro.

You can download the torrent file and the utorrent program on the below page.

http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/charity-news/archive/2008/10/2008-wikipedia-for-schools

Here is the Wikipedia page giving an overview of the encyclopedia for offline use:

http://schools-wikipedia.org/

Once you have downloaded the file you can unzip it using a program called an archive manager.
WinZip is a popular archive manager. I use a manager called 7-zip.

Using bit torrent and working with archives are great skills to have in this day and age.