On 3/1/06, Alan Young <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > I'm considering creating a little letters game for my 2-year old. > > > Something along the lines of "toddler pushes a key, the letter for > > > that key is displayed on the screen and spoken if you have speakers", > > > maybe with some pictures of things that start with that letter. Would > > > anyone be interested in contributing pictures/sounds, testing, or > > > having their children test such a program? > > I'd strongly suggest searching the existing repositories for similar > existing software. > > The education section on freshmeat ( http://freshmeat.net/browse/71/ ) > has almost 900 applications. > > Here are two I'm famliar with that either do what you want or come close to > it: > > http://childsplay.sourceforge.net > http://gcompris.net/-en-
I spent about four hours scouring FreshMeat and came up with the following games aimed at children under 5 that actually work on OS X: - Childsplay (mentioned above) -- Tough to install, and a bit rough around the edges as far as graphics/sound go. Only three of the dozen or so subgames that were in the extra download actually showed up, even though I installed the extra 'plugins'. Good letter/animal associations with pictures, though. - Montessori Bells -- click on bells and the bell rings. Nice sounding, but not much in the way of a game. - MatchGame -- click on four colored areas in the same order that they light up. - TuxPaint -- Keeper! Let's little kids mess around with painting, complete with sound effects. I had something like this on my 286 (KidPix, I think) when I was a kid that was a bit more polished, but it was a commercial product. Four hours of searching FreshMeat, four usable open source games for children under five. Pretty pathetic, IMO. I should mention that there were about five other games (including gcompris), that looked like they would work on linux or windows, but I'm not using linux or windows at home. I'm still planning on starting a kids game project that should work out-of-the box on OS X and Windows, and on Linux if the dependencies are installed. I'll send a note to the list when I actually get going on it. ~ Nathan _______________________________________________ Ldsoss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ldsoss.org/mailman/listinfo/ldsoss
