Codepad – The ClassHelper.org™ Blog

This weeks’s news digest examines zero tolerance laws and the effects they have on children, the Texas evolution battle, federal stimulus money, and how the economy is affecting student university choices. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

We experienced a few hours of downtime while investigating a kernel issue on the server that hosts the ClassHelper.org network of sites; things are back to nomal now, with a shiny new kernel installed. We apologize to anyone who was inconvenienced by this outage. Thanks again for your support!

Everyone needs a little down time every now and again. Whether you’re taking a break from hours of programming, trying to calm a conference-induced headache, or just relaxing at home, these Linux-based games offer a nice chance to unwind. The titles listed here are all available in the Ubuntu software repositories; just search for “games” in Synaptic if you want an idea of just how many choices are available. 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 »