KITE Kerala adds Tamil, Kannada content to global GCompris education software

Thiruvananthapuram: The state-run Kerala Infrastructure and Technology for Education (KITE) has added Tamil and Kannada content to GCompris, one of the world's leading educational entertainment software programs. This marks a significant contribution to the global Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community.

KITE, the technology arm of Kerala's General Education Department, developed the localised content for its Kalipetti (Play Box) ICT textbooks, used by students in Classes 1 to 4 under the Kerala state syllabus, according to a statement. Previously, Indian language support in GCompris was largely limited to Sanskrit and Malayalam.

"This initiative marks a significant expansion into other regional languages," said KITE CEO K Anvar Sadath. Although Kerala provides textbooks in Tamil and Kannada for students in border areas and linguistic minority schools, the absence of such content in the global GCompris repository had prompted KITE to develop its own localised solutions within the KITE GNU/Linux operating suite. The global integration followed a visit to KITE last October by Timothée Giet, a French graphics artist, GCompris co-maintainer, and lead developer of Krita software, who requested KITE to upload its localisation packages to the official repository.

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KITE subsequently prepared 1,544 GUI translations and voice-overs in Tamil and 1,582 in Kannada. The contribution has been formally approved by the KDE Community, one of the world's largest collectives of free software developers, and is now available across platforms, including the Google Play Store. GCompris includes nearly 200 activities designed to help children up to ten years old develop skills in numeracy, literacy, science, and geography through play.

Sadath highlighted that Kerala leads the world in large-scale implementation of Free Software for education in a specific region and expressed pride in contributing locally developed resources back to the global FOSS community. KITE is also leveraging GCompris' new client-server model-which works effectively without an internet connection-to benefit children with special needs, the official added.