Debian Junior education packages

Atomix is an educational game designed for GNOME in which one has to build molecules, ranging from simple inorganic ones to some extremely complex organic ones, out of separate atoms.

The first levels can be rather easy, but added complexity always comes with the next level, so that several minutes (or much longer than that) can be spent on each single level.

Bambam is a simple baby keyboard masher application that locks the keyboard and mouse and instead displays bright colors, pictures, and sounds.

Note: for safety it is recommended to run the game in a dedicated login session, rather than as an application in your regular session, especially when leaving your child unattended with the game. Look for session type BamBam in your display manager login screen.

Childsplay provides memory activities that are fun to play and at the same time learn sounds, images, letters and numbers; activities that train the child to use the mouse and keyboard and pure game activities like puzzles, pong, pacman and billiards.

This is an interactive tool for creating random fractal planets and terrain areas with oceans, rivers, lakes and icecaps. The results can be exported as models to POV-Ray and to Blender, or as texture maps for more general usage.

GCompris is a high quality educational software suite, including a large number of activities for children aged 2 to 10. Some of the activities are game orientated, but nonetheless still educational.

KTuberling is a drawing toy for small children with several activites.

• Give the potato a funny face, clothes, and other goodies
• Build a small town, complete with school, zoo, and fire department
• Create a fantastic moonscape with spaceships and aliens

KTuberling can speak the name of each the object in several languages, to assist in learning basic vocabulary.

This package is part of the KDE games module.

Numpty Physics is a drawing puzzle game in the spirit (and style?) of Crayon Physics using the same excellent Box2D engine. It melds cute schoolbook-style graphics with a kind of realistic physics engine.

It includes a built-in editor so that you may build (and submit) your own levels.

pySioGame is a set of educational activities and games for children aged between 3 and 10. The activities are grid based and can be played all in a single window. pySioGame includes maths, reading, writing, painting, and memory activities.

A collection of activities based on simple objects, photographies, numbers and letters with their sounds in different languages. The activities make children practice on clicking, double-clicking, drag and drop, moving and identify the mouse buttons. From its website many packages can be downloaded to add new photos and text to the activities.

Stellarium renders 3D photo-realistic skies in real-time. With Stellarium, you really see what you can see with your eyes, binoculars or a small telescope.

Some features:

• default star catalogue with over 600 thousand stars,
• information about the brightest stars (spectral type, distance, etc.),
• downloadable star catalogue extensions, for up to 210 million stars,
• all New General Catalogue (NGC) objects,
• images of almost all Messier objects and the Milky Way,
• real time positions of the planets and their satellites,
• 13 different cultures with their constellations,
• artistic illustrations of the 88 Western constellations,
• very realistic atmosphere, sunrise and sunset,
• 7 panoramic landscapes (more can be made or downloaded from the website),
• scripting with ECMAScript,
• plug-in support: Stellarium comes with 8 plug-ins by default, including:
• artificial satellites plug-in (updated from an on-line TLE database),
• ocular simulation plug-in (shows how objects look like in a given ocular),
• Solar System editor plug-in (imports comet and asteroid data from the MPC),
• telescope control plug-in (Meade LX200 and Celestron NexStar compatible).

Stellarium should not be used for very high accurate calculation or ephemerids like eclipse predictions. However, it is the ideal program to prepare an observation evening with naked eye, binocular, or small telescope.

A simple educational game that simulates bouncing balls in a window. Gravity, elasticity, and ability to collide can all be adjusted.

Young children enjoy watching the balls bounce around the screen and are fascinated by the program. This is an ideal program for teaching rudimentary mouse skills to very young children.

XMakemol is a mouse-based program, written using the LessTif widget set, for viewing and manipulating atomic and other chemical systems. It reads XYZ input and renders atoms, bonds and hydrogen bonds.

Features include:

• Animating multiple frame files
• Interactive measurement of bond lengths, bond angles and torsion angles
• Control over atom/bond sizes
• Exporting to Xpm, Encapsulated PostScript and XYZ formats
• Toggling the visibility of groups of atoms
• Editing the positions of subsets of atoms

XMakemol is a mouse-based program, written using the LessTif widget set, for viewing and manipulating atomic and other chemical systems. It reads XYZ input and renders atoms, bonds and hydrogen bonds.

Features include:

• Animating multiple frame files
• Interactive measurement of bond lengths, bond angles and torsion angles
• Control over atom/bond sizes
• Exporting to Xpm, Encapsulated PostScript and XYZ formats
• Toggling the visibility of groups of atoms
• Editing the positions of subsets of atoms

This is the OpenGL-enabled XMakemol package. The images are rendered using true 3D graphics primitives, and can be exported using the Xpm format; red/blue stereo images can also be produced. The OpenGL package provides more display options, along with better support for displaying vectors. Ellipses can also be rendered.

KStars is a scientifically accurate desktop planetarium, visualising a graphical simulation of the night sky from any location on Earth, at any date and time. The display includes 130,000 stars, 13,000 deep-sky objects, all 8 planets, the Sun and Moon, and thousands of comets and asteroids. KStars addresses students and amateur astronomers of all levels.

The database of known objects can be extended and updated from local or remote databases, which is prepared for in a user-extendable interface. KStars suggests observations of particular interest like conjunctions with respect to the location of the user. And for user-selected targets it proposes the ones that are best-observable.

The software may be used for planning experiments around the globe, e.g. for remote controlled commercial services. But KStars also features an INDI interface to control local telescopes and cameras. Users with programming experience can script it via the KDE desktop bus.