Pandora for children


A Pandora is a great device for kids, as long as they're taught to respect it and given some guidance. Imagine if the kids of the 80s were only given basic NES-like systems, because Speccies and Commodores were too advanced for them. A generation of coders would never have existed. And we wouldn't be here talking about the Pandora... ;)
 
On the topic, are there any young languages that run on pandora for example?


like pacoal or something a kid could start on the coding world right off it?


edit...I agree with Gruso, always had a computer home, my dad got a COCOII for us when we were really young. The adventure games (IF) is exactly what led me to insist in taking english courses at that time.
 
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Did you checkout he tux4kids pnd?


Fun educating games with tux, a spelling, math and drawing application are included :)
 
Well if you want to start a kid off with coding there's always PandaBAS. :)


Then all you need is a good source of programs for them to type in to get them started.


- Neelix
 
Had a good definition discussion, but I mixed up Fiable <-- which I seen used in a sentence numerous times and Faible which is something totally different and I never seen used.
 
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Faible is a german word for addiction predilection or partiality. hmc is from germany afaik, so maybe he mixed it up a bit.
 
Yes, I am,


And yes, I did. Sorry. ;-) For some reason, I thought "faible" was an English word.


What I meant was more something like "liking" or even "weakness".
 
Tux4Kids:


I installed it quite a long time ago already.


TuxPaint is a favorite of my younger daughter already.


TuxType and TuxMath were problematic at first, because I thought it is English only.


Just now I realized the language can be configured, and word lists exist for German too, so I will give it a second try. Great!
 
I just found GCompris. This is really great for younger children. I will immediately contact the author and ask, if he would be interested in porting that to the Pandora. I have not found the sources anywhere, so I cannot try myself (yet, at least). GCompris apperently has been developed with so much enthusiam and love for the detail. It's really amazing.

Any luck on this? The sources can be downloaded from their website, I'll try to get it working...
 
Really? I have not found the source download, so I thought it was not open source.


I contacted the author, but he's not interested in porting it to the Pandora.


But if the sources are available, then let's try it!


I only suspect, several modules ned to be adapted. Often there is a large background image spanning the entire screen, and game elements are covering only a small part of the screen, which is good on a larger PC screen, but on the Pandora the actually used portion of the screen will be too small. Maybe we should try to optimize screen usage in that regard.


If you already try to port it, it probably won't make sense, if I try it too, so please just let me know your progress. I am not a porting expert, have ported some software already, but mainly with bare re-compiling, but if I can help in any way, let me know!


Daniel
 
I just managed to get through ./configure and I'm trying to get the thing compiled. It consists of a huge amount of modules, so adapting them all to the screen size and inputs of the Pandora is probably going to be a bit of a task. I had to install quite a few packages to get through ./configure, and I disabled some optional stuff like GNet to get things started. During compilation I got an error about glib-mkenums, which turns out to be in libglib2.0-utils (or something like that). It is currently still grinding through the compilation (the amount of activities is really quite big so this will take a while). Looks like I'll also have to make some symlinks to help it find some libraries.


Perhaps we can each do some of the modules?
 
Sure. Let's see how it turns out to work on the Pandora, and then we can see, which modules need adaption.


I'll gladly do part of the work, provided I am able to (as I said, I am not a development expert, especially when it comes to multimedia stuff... but I am willing to learn!)
 
GCompris works quite nicely on my Pandora now: the resolution is not an issue since it is mostly SVG based and automatically zooms to the right resolution. I only have to go to windowed mode and back to full screen to get it completely right (otherwise the top and bottom part get cut off), I still have to figure out how to fix that. Everything else (sound, touchscreen) seems to work OK. I just noticed a glitch when quitting some activities, it does not display the main menu and shows a white screen instead. I also still need to get it to compile with full Python support. I obviously did not try all activities yet (there are 123 of them), but the ones I did try seemed to work fine.


So you can expect a PND soon!
 
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