Teaching tech to tots: The use of Linux and open source in pre-schools

David M Williams
Sunday, 03 August 2008 21:53

Opinion and Analysis

Going in reverse order, the authors of GCompris are committed to the Linux operating system and consequently have deliberately restricted the Windows version to a small number of activities unless you opt to pay a nominal registration fee. So, under Microsoft Windows, GCompris is not free.

Secondly, though, the use of Linux has not proven to be a barrier for school children. Earlier this year my colleague Sam Varghese filed a remarkable story of Strathcona Baptist Girls Grammar School. The school successfully deployed a large-scale Linux deployment across 350 workstations. There was a distinct reduction in software costs, less administration and downtime and absolutely no virus problems. Despite this six years later the school reverted back to Microsoft Windows. The reasons, it transpired, were not due to financial or technical concerns but purely because the school’s staff pressed for Microsoft Windows due to their own personal familiarity with that system. Sam’s story noted that the students themselves were entirely comfortable with the Linux environment. And, ironically, the school staff found themselves equally lost in the new regime of Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007.

I too looked into the use of Linux in schools around the world. In every case the school pupils were totally unfazed by non-Windows environments and in every case embraced the varying Linux platforms they were presented with. This also gave me strong confidence that a new breed of computer users would not encounter any difficulties with their school computers potentially looking and acting differently to those they used at home. If anything, it would help establish an eye for patterns and transferable concepts across computer systems rather than a rigid compliance to any individual program.

While conducting my investigation I also concluded that even if the students are comfortable with the platform there needs to be quality teaching tools or the implementation will not be a success. With Edubuntu this requirement is met. In fact, a study by the European Commission into a Linux rollout in Slovakia explicitly states the school found GCompris “a lot better than some of the available commercial educational applications” while a Namibia comic strip also spruiked its value.

GCompris’ developers themselves maintain a brief collection of stories about schools they have come across using the package and this is well worth reading through. It has shown up in such western nations as the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, but also India, Peru, China, Spain, Estonia, Finland and South Africa among others. The stories echo my experiences with some saying “The kids immediately understood how to use the software and really enjoyed the games.” The package has been put to use in kindergarten through to year six and in autistic learning centres, special education classes as well as neurological rehabilitation within hospitals.

Your favoured brand of Linux may not be Ubuntu; that’s fine, you can easily download and install GCompris using the package manager on your system or download it from here. Of course, there is much more to Edubuntu that GCompris but for me it absolutely was the standout application and it absolutely met the needs of the pre-school and this sentiment is echoed worldwide by many schools who have successfully chosen to use it.

If you are a parent or educator, do look into what open source software has to offer you, and do so without fear that your child will have difficulties transitioning from Microsoft Windows to a Linux environment.