Lisa’s First Laptop
Lisa’s laptop is a Dell Inspiron 8500, this laptop is no longer available and has since been replaced. However, this one is in mint condition as it was very well looked after by Nana Carol and Grandpa Bob in Canada.
This is a stock photo I found of what a “clean” one looks like
This is what Lisa’s looks like
Rather then opting for the bog standard, over used and ill secured Microsoft Windows, I installed Edubuntu, Linux. For me the biggest reason for selecting this was it’s ease of use for kids (well anyone really), the ability for me to secure it as much or little as I like. I have a much finer level of control over this then I would have had with Windows.
Edubuntu has been designed specifically for kids and education in mind. It’s really just a normal distribution of Ubuntu, but it’s got a lot more games and educational software pre-installed.
One of the main educational tools for kids is GCompris.
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GCompris is an educational software which propose different activities to children from 2 to 10 years old.
 GCompris is an educational software suite comprising of numerous activities for children aged 2 to 10. Some of the activities are game orientated, but nonetheless still educational. Below you can find a list of categories with some of the activities available in that category.
Currently GCompris offers in excess of 100 activities and more are being developed. GCompris is free software, that means that you can adapt it to your own needs, improve it and, most importantly, share it with children everywhere. |
computer discovery: keyboard, mouse, different mouse gesture, …
Most of the games included in GCompris Lisa can play unaided and she’s worked out most by herself. As you can see from the info provided by the home page for GCompris, the games are very brightly coloured, have sounds and just generally keep kids entertained while improving their eye / hand co-ordination, concentration, reaction times and generally improve their computer skills.
The other educational games package included is called Childsplay. This is an interesting suite of games, but it’s still clearly a work in progress. There are only a few games Lisa can play on this one. Most of the games are keyboard based so she gets to learn to find the letters and numbers on the keyboard. Some of the other games are sound games, like it will play an animal sound and you click on the matching animal.
This is what Lisa’s desktop looks like on her computer:
You can see some links to the games on the desktop as well links to sites like the BBC’s CBeebies, CBC’s Kids’CBC and Disney’s Online Games. These sites are all very kids safe, have no popup’s or otherwise Internet silliness.
You might notice the small padlocks next to all the icons.. I had to do this as after only about 10-20 mins Lisa managed to do something most of us can only dream of, she cleared all the “clutter” off her desktop 
However, this meant she lost the ability to actually do anything haha. I had to put everything back then lock them down so she can’t delete them anymore.
There is an icon for Movies (centre row and top line), this opens a web browser that points to page I’ve created for her machine that gives direct links to AVI files of DVD’s that we own and that she likes the most, you can see some of the selections here:
I’ve made the page with the DVD covers of the movies she likes, the big images makes it easy for her to select the movie she likes. The movies open in VLC Media Player. This a very popular open source media player. I have this configured to open in full screen mode so the entire screen is used for the movie. The volumes have been hard set so as not to blow us all away haha. The girls can adjust the volume up only by a small margin, but it is capped.
Here are a couple of screen shots of the Educational and Games menus ..
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I thought I had a couple of pics of Lisa at the computer but I can’t find them off hand.. but here’s one of Emma watching a movie
Cambridge, UNITED KINGDOM
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