The Project
GCompris is a high quality educational software suite comprising numerous activities for children aged 2 to 10. Some of the activities are game orientated, but nonetheless still educational.
It is free software, that means you can adapt it to your own needs, improve it and, most importantly, share it with children everywhere.
Currently the graphics are one of the weakest part, as they were mostly done by the developers, using free graphics assets and sparse graphic artist contributions.
To address this problem, we found Timothée Giet, a talented graphic artist interested in working on a complete graphics redesign. He is a long standing Free-Software contributor, active member of the Krita team and so part of the KDE community.
Making new graphics for more than 100 activities is a big work, so we need your help to achieve this goal.
GCompris is used woldwide by parents and teachers willing to provide valuable educational content to their children. This project was started in 2000 and has continuously improved over the years. Available on major desktop platforms, a full rewrite of the project is in progress to take care of tablet users. This new version is developped in Qt Quick which will allow GCompris to run on major desktop and tablet operating systems from a single code base.
This rewrite was started in January 2014 and so far 84 activities of the 140 from the old version have already been ported.
New Design Preview
Here are some examples of new graphics to give a preview of the new style guidelines. These are work-in-progress pictures, not final result.
You can look at those old design screenshots to see the difference.
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The project is not only about creating new background images but consists in a whole graphical rework. At first a graphic charter will be defined as none exists for now in GCompris. This will drive the project towards a unified style that it lacks today.
An emphasis will be done on usability, making sure the children find their way easily in each activity.
Work For The Community
Quality level educational software are pretty rare, especially when it comes to free software. GCompris is of major importance to those focusing on education. For instance, teaching children in the language they use is a top priority. By the free software nature of GCompris it is affordable for a small community to translate GCompris in a minority language.
This graphical rework will make GCompris much more appealing to children. Having a unified consistent user experience will help children find their way in GCompris whatever the activity they use.
All the work resulting from this project will be released under both the GPL V3+ and Creative-Commons CC-BY-SA licenses. This will allow all the work to be reused by other free licensed projects.
The development of the new version is done under the umbrella of the KDE community. This development community, well know for its popular desktop and applications, is also providing educational software as part of the KDE Education group.
The new version of GCompris is already available as a closed beta on the Android play store. If you want to look at it you can join the 'GCompris tester' community on Google+. It will be released to the public in the first quarter of 2015. The source code is available on the KDE repository.
Donation Rewards
As the success of this project depends on your donations, we would like to offer something to show our gratitude to donors.
- 5$: Thank-you for contributing ! You are helping to make the world a better place :)
- 10$: Free access to the Android version when released.
- 20$: Activation code for the Windows version.
- 50$: Get a special thank-you collector postcard. Limited to 300 unit.
- 1000$: an original personal illustration, topic of your choice (pencil on paper). Limited to 3 unit.
- 2000$: an original personal illustration, topic of your choice (pencil on paper + digital painting high-resolution file ). Limited to 3 unit.
For the Android version free access, your purchase on the play store will be reimbursed on demand.
Activation codes for the Windows version will be sent directly.
The postcards are planned to ship in February 2015.
For the personal illustration rewards, shipping will happen during the year 2015.
Budget And Planning
We estimate doing new graphics for all of the 140 activities will take at least 150 days of work, probably more. This work should start in January 2015 and be finished before the end of the year. For this we need to collect at least 25000$.
The project will have three steps :
- Document the new graphic charter
- Rework the main user interface, menu, dialogs, buttons, ...
- Rework the activities one by one
The first two steps should not be very long to achieve, while the third step includes the biggest part of the work.
Of course we need to reach our funding goal to be able to complete all activities redesign.
If we don't reach our initial goal, we'll start the work and do as much activity redesign as possible.
If we go beyond our initial goal, depending on the amount, another set of graphical improvements will be done by adding frame-by-frame animation on relevant parts of GCompris. For example, in the activity where the children send a ball to Tux, we will make the ball and the Tux character animations more alive, like in a cartoon.
Even if GCompris is an open development, it is hard to do a collaborative work on such graphic tasks. Still, we'll provide ways for volunteers to give feedback and help where possible.
Spread The Word
Some good ways to help this project is to promote GCompris within your community and tell the world we need them!
You can also contribute to the project by providing feedback, code or translations.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q- If Gcompris is Free Software, why do I need to buy the Android version, or the activation code for Windows ?
A- GCompris is Free Software for all and gratis on free software platforms like GNU/Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse, Mageia … ). However building packages for proprietary platforms takes some time and is worth asking to pay for it. It is a good compromise that allow us to continue to maintain and improve the project over time.
Q- Does the code for the Windows version also work for the MacOS X version?
A- Yes, but the old version doesn't run on Mavericks. There is a beta
preview from the current port using Qt Quick that runs on Mavericks
available here: http://gcompris.net/download_macosx-fr.html
Q- Can I pay using Paypal ?
A- Sorry, we don't support Paypal for this campaign for some reasons.Though
if you really want to contribute with your paypal account, you can go
to the official GCompris website and use the "Donate" button and add in a comment saying you want this donation to support the graphics redesign.
