Codepad – The ClassHelper.org™ Blog

The ClassHelper.org computer science section has a new tutorial on setting up an Openfire collaboration server using a Debian Linux virtual machine (or real, physical server… as you prefer). This is good information for anyone who’d like to get started with collaboration software in their school or business; the tutorial provides step-by-step instructions for each stage of the install. Enjoy!

As a follow-up to my post about Celestia, here’s a video produced of the demo mode. It was created on my Toshiba Satellite laptop (AMD Turion X2, 3 GB RAM, ATI Radeon 3100 256 MB). If you create your own videos from Celestia sequences, please be aware that the real-time frame rate will drop considerably while video recording is in progress; this is normal, due to the need to grab a lot of information from the animation. Read the rest of this entry »

Fractals have always held a certain sway over me; they’re a beautiful representation of math, with nearly limitless possibilities for learning and exploration. You can use the open source application Xaos to get acquainted with a diverse range of fractal functions, from the famous Mandelbrot set to less well-known examples. This package is available for Linux, MacOSX, and Windows operating systems. Read the rest of this entry »

This classroom software review focuses on KGeography, a free and open source application from the KDE-Edu suite of educational software for Linux-based operating systems. The examples shown here are running under Ubuntu Linux, but the application is available for a wide variety of distributions. Check your favorite distro’s package manager; you’ll probably find it there.

With support for hundreds of countries, this application is fully capable of helping students learn and reinforce a ton of geography knowledge. Here’s the default startup view, allowing the user to pick a country to work with. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a parent or teacher looking for a neat fractions practice application, give KBruch a try. Easily installed from the Ubuntu software repositories, this free software allows students to practice an endless number of fraction problems. With support for just about any type of problem you can imagine, the application features one-click access to basic fraction addition and subtraction, comparison problems (less than, greater than), decimal conversions, and factorization. Read the rest of this entry »

Teachers seeking a way to help students explore geometric constructs in an easy to learn plotting environment might like Kig. Part of the KDE Education Project, this application is designed to (from the Kig documentation):

1. Allow students to interactively explore mathematical figures and concepts using the computer.

2. Serve as a WYSIWYG tool for drawing mathematical figures and including them in other documents.

Both of these goals are accomplished quite well; I found Kig to be easy to use, full-featured, and fun. Here’s a screenshot with a line vector, an ellipse, and an arc. Read the rest of this entry »

My first introduction to computers and the world of programming was through languages like GW-BASIC, QuickBASIC, and ANSI C. As a kid, I inherited an 8086-based PC from my father, along with a few operating system manuals and programming references. Later on, I spend endless hours playing with Apple II computers in elementary school. This was probably the single biggest influence on my future professional life, as it taught me that I could easily make a computer do exactly what I wanted. Read the rest of this entry »

Tux Likes Learning

In my never-ending quest to find cool educational apps for teachers and parents, I’ve been introduced to SchoolForge. This project aims to provide everything a teacher or school network administrator could ever want for running a smooth, ultra low cost I.T. operation.

Applications are grouped by category; you’ve got antivirus and anti-spyware, Internet apps, multimedia software, office tools, and web-based systems to pick from. Representing the “best of the best” in open source software solutions in their respective fields, these are proven applications that can really shrink expenditures on traditional software systems. Many are available for multiple platforms (Windows, Linux, and MacOSX). Here’s a few examples from the project site. Read the rest of this entry »