Codepad – The ClassHelper.org™ Blog

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.

KGeography Map Chooser

For our example, we’ll be using the United States map, since this happens to the the region I’m most familiar with. The map view allows you to zoom in and out, identify states by clicking on them, and see the state flag for each one below its name. This view also allows you to select different educational activities, allowing the student to identify states by location, place states in an initially blank map, identify state capitals, and more.

KGeography Map View

Each quiz is designed to reinforce basic knowledge about the region you’ve selected. Here’s an example of a state capitals quiz:

KGeography State Capitals Quiz

Overall, I like this application. From a user’s perspective, there are probably some things that could be done a bit better; using SVG graphics for nations and regions would allow for smooth zooming, and there’s no built-in printing support. If  you wanted to use this application as a source for region graphics, you could take screenshots and edit the resulting images, but I’m hoping for printing  and file export support in a later release. Maybe I’ll break out my developer tools and start submitting patches.