Well, I’ve been on my Internet downloading spree for a few days now, and a side effect of all that Internet usage is that I’ve changed around my SIM cards so I pay less, and therefore my phone number has changed, too. If you intend on calling me, look in the right column to see the new info.
So what have I been downloading to try out for the school computers? It’s all I’ve been focusing on recently, so let’s review. On a conceptual level, I’ve been looking for the following attributes in games and applications that I think will appeal to children of various ages (not including children who just need to learn a specific program, like a word processor), with the ideal (not yet achieved) being that each program would possess all four attributes:
- Teaches specific lessons, like multiplication, history, etc.
- Many such games exist, and it’s difficult to sift through them all, especially with all the short, single-lesson Flash games out there. Also, a lot of them are mind-numbingly bland.
- Has a lot of (correct) English text in it
- Many games and applications use icons and symbols. Corresponding text would be incredibly helpful for pre and early readers. On the low end, for the pre-readers, I like to see simple 1-to-1 correspondence between text and symbol. On the high end, for the older kids, I like to see reading as integral to the game, not just story elements that can be skipped. I see a lot of bad English in the smaller, single-developer games (for whom English is often not a first language), and in newer Flash games I see a lot of slang that might be unhelpful to the early readers.
- Requires freeform sentence typing
- This is a difficult one, especially because I’m assuming the computers have no Internet, but I think it’s really important to find an outlet for the children to write, as opposed to copy. Writing assignments only keep a child busy for so long, but a program that keeps the child typing from memory for a long time would do wonders if it could be sustained. I observe a few subcategories here:
- Text adventure games (old or new), in which the player types simple commands like “look under the bridge,” or in the older games, “look bridge,” the latter of which is not helpful for building correct grammar skills.
- Fake webcams, like Subservient Chicken, which are entertaining, although they are limited in scope and I’ve yet to see one that works offline.
- Chatbots (For offline use I usually just find small, proof-of-concept 1-on-1 chat programs), although an interesting concept is the chatbot-in-game, in which the player converses with the computer-controlled characters (as opposed to typing commands like “talk to man”) in order to achieve something. Again, hard to find offline, but I really want to try Starship Titanic, which you should really read about to understand. It’s not free, so I’ll need to have it shipped here, but it sounds unique enough that it might be worth it.
- Network chat (for students to chat with each other, either in a game or in an IM program)
- Teaches logic, preferably complex puzzle/problem solving. I haven’t really broken this down yet, but puzzles that are strictly visual are not sufficient in my opinion. Many graphic adventure games require the player to remember past events, deduce solutions, as well as solve visual puzzles.
Of course, as mentioned before, I am also trying to download full CD images that contain such software on top of a freestanding operating system, but those are big downloads that are still running.
Note that I am bounding myself by the following constraints:
- Everything should be free.
- Everything must work on either Linux or Windows (and I mean it needs to work on original Win95 AND Vista, which is a good test for both very old and very new programs), even if it means running an emulator or installing other free software. I expect problems on Win95 with Java and .NET apps.
- Abandonware is only acceptable if game license ownership is truly not known.
- Flash games that are downloaded with a browser must be freely available (not through a site subscription) and core functionality must be intact, even offline, with just the SWF file.
- Nothing can have an Internet dependency.
- Pentium (pre-MMX) must be able to run it.
The last two requirements hurt the most, and additionally I’m not sure which will programs will really fail on Win95. I’ll need to get the actual computers set up to see. The goal of having the children type freeform is hurt most by not having Internet, and I may eventually find a “killer app” that convinces me that learning will benefit tangibly and significantly from even a slow Internet connection. We’ll see.
If two programs provide similar benefits and are both sufficiently engaging, I will pick the one that sits highest on this list:
- Open source with Windows and Linux binaries available
- Closed source but works on both platforms
- Open source but on just one platform
- Closed source on one platform
So there you have it, the method to my downloading madness. Because this post had a lot of tech stuff in it, here’s a photo from this weekend of some matatu seats with a cool tech theme:
