Thiruvananthapuram, state-run KITE has added Tamil and Kannada content to GCompris, one of the world’s leading edutainment software.
This represents a major contribution to the global FOSS community.
KITE, the technology arm of the Kerala Public Education Department, has developed the translated content for Kalipetti ICT textbooks, which are used by students in classes I to IV under the Kerala curriculum, according to a statement.
Previously, Hindi language support in GCompris was largely limited to Sanskrit and Malayalam. “This initiative represents a significant expansion into other regional languages,” said K. Anvar Sadath, CEO of KITE.
Although Kerala provides textbooks in Tamil and Kannada to students in border areas and language minority schools, the absence of such content in the global GCompris repository prompted KITE to develop its own local solutions under the KITE GNU/Linux operating suite.
The global integration followed a visit to KITE last October by Timothy Guette, a French graphics artist, co-supervisor at GCompris and lead developer of Krita, who asked KITE to upload its translation packages to the official repository.
KITE subsequently prepared 1,544 GUI translations and voiceovers in Tamil and 1,582 in Kannada.
The contribution has been officially approved by the KDE community, one of the largest gatherings of free software developers in the world, and is now available across platforms, including the Google Play Store.
GCompris includes nearly 200 activities designed to help children up to the age of 10 develop their numeracy, reading, writing, science and geography skills through play.
Emphasizing that Kerala leads the world in implementing FOSS for education on a large scale in a given region, Sadat expressed his pride in contributing indigenously developed resources to the FOSS community globally.
The official added that KITE is also leveraging GCompris’ new client-server model – which effectively works offline – to benefit children with special needs.
This article was generated from an automated news feed without any modifications to the text.
