Educational games are games designed to teach people, typically young people, about a certain subject or help them learn a skill as they play. Sometimes this type of software is known as games edutainment because they combine education and entertainment.
This type of software aids the ‘normal’ learning process, either by helping the individual to absorb new information, or as a support for recalling information already learned. Educational programs, especially those for the youngest students, are often designed with the idea of ‘learn through play’. Many children are easily bored, and they are much more likely to be attentive if they find the activity or task to be enjoyable.
Linux has many attributes which make it an ideal platform to run educational games. This type of software typically runs perfectly well on older hardware. It makes little sense for an elementary school to purchase state-of-the-art computers, just so that the operating system runs at a reasonable speed when the educational software itself is much less demanding. Moreover, as the vast majority of Linux distributions are available to download at no cost, parents and schools have more reason to provide a full complement of software and student learning materials even in financially difficult times.
There are hundreds and hundreds of free fun educational games available to download, so recommending only 3 is fiendishly difficult. After many hours of agonizing and debate, we’ll give our gold medal award to GCompris. New activities are constantly being added to this wonderful software suite, and it’s available in many languages. If you have a child that’s under 10 years old, they’ll love the game orientated activities.
All of our medal winners are, of course, released under a freely distributable license and can be downloaded without charge.
| Educational Games - Best Free Software | |
|---|---|
 | GCompris is a high quality educational software suite, including a large number of activities for children aged 2 to 10. Compris offers in excess of 100 activities and more are being developed. http://gcompris.net/ License: GNU General Public License v3 |
 | Childsplay is a collection of educational activities for young children. Childsplay is a fun and save way to let young children use the computer and at the same time teach them a little math, letters of the alphabet, spelling, eye-hand coordination etc. http://www.schoolsplay.org/ License: GNU General Public License v3 |
 | Colobot is an educational game aiming to teach programming through entertainment. You are playing as an astronaut on a journey with robot helpers to find a planet for colonization. It features 3D real-time graphics and a C++ and Java-like, object-oriented language, CBOT, which can be used to program the robots available in the game. The game has received endorsements and awards for its educational capabilities. https://colobot.info/ License: GNU General Public License v3 |
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