eduActiv8

eduActiv8 (formerly pySioGame) is a completely FREE offline collection of simple interactive educational activities designed with kids in mind. Initially the application started as a personal project that over the years turned into a cross-platform, open-source, educational program for children that is used by thousands around the world.

The application offers hundreds of short educational activities including sets of flashcards presenting new knowledge, "simulation" activities allowing kids to tweak numbers to see how things change to better understand certain concepts, as well as the good old drill activities in a form of interactive worksheets to allow the practice of newly attained skills by moving virtual objects around the screen - somewhat in support of the learning through play idea.

eduActiv8 is suitable for children in the first six years of primary school but can be easily used by pre-school kids with some guidance from parents.

Currently, the activities within the program mainly focus on basic concepts of maths (learning numbers, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, fractions, patterns, symmetry, time and much more) but also there are some language exercises (alphabet and some word activities) and general logic games and memory training exercises, puzzles, colour games, etc.

The program runs on Windows, MacOS, Linux and Android.

A subset of the eduActiv8 project has also been rewritten in Lua/LÖVE for iOS and is now available for iPhones and iPads. This has been released as two separate apps eduActiv8: Language Arts and eduActiv8: Math & Science. It is a separately managed project that has been rewritten from scratch thanks to funding from Lakota Language Initiative of the Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation and Elon University. You can find out more about the eduActiv8 Mobile project at hackranch.com.

eduActiv8 is free for anyone to use and is licenced under GPLv3.

What's New?

eduActiv8 project has recently received the All Digital School Editors' Pick Award in the Early Childhood, Mathematics, Reading, and Special Education category.

A new version of the eduActiv8 has been recently released (version 4.20.01). A large chunk of the available activities has been redesigned, however not all of them so there may be some consistency issues that will be ironed out at some point. In general, they look more polished and a little bit less of prototype quality. Also, a number of minor issues have been fixed along the way.

eduActiv8 has also been released again for Android but this time not published on the Play Store (due to a requirement for 64-bit build which is currently not possible). More in the installation section.

What's inside eduActiv8?

The availability of activities may depend on the choice of language, age/difficulty, availability of support software (i.e. eSpeak) as well as other technical parameters such as screen resolution and the platform the software is running on.

• Language activities:
  • learn the alphabet in a selected language
  • learn to write printed and cursive letters, however, this is still best done on paper (not all available languages are supported).
  • Touch Typing Tutor - learn positions of letters/keys on keyboard (UK, US, German, Greek, French, Polish and Russian keyboard layouts supported so far and only on desktop computers)
  • learn new words in multiple categories - a variation of spelling, matching and listening activities
• Maths activities:
  • learn numbers 1 - 20
  • learn number spellings 0 - 100
  • learn to count
  • learn to add, subtract, multiply and divide (positive and negative numbers)
  • columnar addition and subtraction, long multiplication and division
  • compare and sort numbers
  • fractions - also included multiple activities helpful in learning to solve problems related to addition, subtraction, multiplication and division of fractions, as well as finding equivalent fractions, etc.
  • decimals, percentages and ratios
  • learn shapes and solids
  • learn to draw shapes
  • draw symmetric shapes and find lines of symmetry
  • learn to complete patterns

• Time activities:
  • play with clock hands and learn how to tell time
  • learn to set the clock by dragging the clock hands
  • match digital time to analogue time
  • learn to find a difference between two times
  • learn to find time so long after or before a given time
• Art and Colour activities:
  • basic painting activity
  • learn colour names
  • learn how colours are formed both by light (RGB) and ink (CMY)
• Memory activities:
  • memorizing a sequence of highlighted squares
  • memorizing a set of directions
  • memorizing locations of matching images
• Other activities:
  • matching shapes
  • tracing lines
  • finding the matching images
  • multiple variations of the "Fifteen" game

Customization features of eduActiv8

• The program can be displayed in normal full colour mode and additionally in 3 experimental higher contrast modes. These can be toggled with the four "A" buttons in the bottom right corner.
• The activity icons can also be customized with the theme editor activity started with the splash button in the bottom right corner. The shape, colour and style of the icons can be changed to fit individual tastes and needs.
• Other than the colour and theme changes available within the program itself there is also an option to customize what activities are being displayed and their difficulty. There are two XML files that can be edited to achieve a certain level of customization. The menu.xml file holds the structure of the categories and the available activities within them. It can be used to hide certain activities or rearrange where and when they are displayed. The levels.xml is responsible for the difficulty of individual activities and can be edited to change the levels or add new ones. Make sure you back up those two files before editing. More documentation on this to follow.

Application layout