Free software developer Timothée Giet visits KITE

Timothée Giet, French graphic artist, co-maintainer of the famous edutainment free educational software ‘GCompris,’ and an active contributor to the Krita software, visited Kerala Infrastructure and Technology for Education (KITE) here on Tuesday.

GCompris is the primary software utilised in ‘Kalipetty’ (Play Box), the ICT textbook developed under KITE’s leadership for students in classes I to IV in Kerala schools.

Mr. Giet, who shared insights into similar free software repositories used in France and Italy, remarked that Kerala’s unique and widespread use of free software in schools was a global model.

Currently, only Malayalam, besides Sanskrit, has an extensive GCompris repository among Indian languages.

KITE chief executive officer K. Anvar Sadath said that KITE would make customised Tamil and Kannada packages available for upstreaming into GCompris.

GCompris, which includes around 200 games, is suitable for children aged two to 10 in acquiring skills in areas such as numeracy, letters, science, geography, and reading through play.

As it is available under a free software license, KITE has fully customised it to align with the State’s curriculum and utilised it in their operating system suite and ICT textbooks.

Mr. Giet’s wife Aishwarya K.K., a native of Kannur district, is a free software consultant and embedded systems engineer in France. She shared that her early free software experience gained through the IT@School project paved the way for a successful career.

Mr. Giet’s visit concluded with KITE’s commitment to take the initiative to customise the new client-server version of GCompris, which functions without internet access, for application with children with special needs, a statement from KITE said.