The ministry of Education in Valencia, one of Spain's autonomous regions and the regional government of La Palma are funding development of Edusig, an open source tool to help teach geography to school children. The application is being hosted on the Osor.eu software development web site since late last month.
The tool combines geographic data, thematic maps and games.
The main development on Edusig is done by the Valencia-based software firm Iver, in close cooperation with the two public bodies and the Spanish National Geographic Institute.
The application is already being used by school children in Valencia and on the island of La Palma, explains one of the developers Alvaro Anguix, who has been working on the application for the past six months. He says that in Valencia Edusig is being used in all schools that use the local GNU/Linux distribution Lliurex. On La Palma the software will be used in combination with the GNU/Linux distribution Meduxa. "The application is the same, but the games and the thematic maps are different." Both games and the maps are developed locally.
The geography teaching tool is based on gvSIG, an open source application to manage geographic information, which is also being developed on the Osor.eu web site. Both applications are published under the GPLv2 open source licence.
The application and the documentation is currently only available in Spanish and Valencian. However, Anguix says translating it into other languages should not be difficult. "And just as easy users can add a different set of geographic data."
Developers in other countries have already shown interest in the tool, he says. "I read several messages on mailing lists that show users in Latin America are testing the application."
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