![]() I am very anxious for my grandchildren to try it, I am sure it will be a hit with them."- Mary Jean Jones "I just downloaded Tux Paint, I am extremely impressed with the program. ~~~Thousands of stamps and magics and they are free!~~~ ~~~Hundreds of school are using it for teaching!~~~ ~~~Hundreds of awards from many media/magazines!~~~ This is the tip of the iceberg.~~~Top education app around the world! over 10,000,000 downloads since 2002!~~~ If you have ideas or tips for how to spur a creative epidemic with these and other FOSS programs, comment below or-even better-consider writing an article for. I can tell you first-hand, it's a truly beautiful sight. It is possible to see these programs making their way into your community. TuxPaint, Inkscape, and GIMP are all free tools for creative exploration. For those of you who work with youth in outside-of-school settings, there is hope that students will voluntarily move themselves off a games-playing path and onto a creative exploration path. I can't explain how it happened, but I give a lot of credit to the programmers who created TuxPaint. Within a span of 10 minutes, the computer center had transformed itself from a games-playing room to a room full of creative exploration. “Can she borrow your drawing for a little while?” I asked the sixth grade boy. “I'm going to try and make the same drawing,” the fourth-grade girl said. I showed the sixth-grade student's drawing to a fourth-grade girl who was enjoying TuxPaint. Students of all ages were exploring different aspects of the program. That's when I noticed that TuxPaint was on most of the computers in our computer center. I offered to print his drawing on our color laser printer. He replied, “My teacher once asked me to draw a bunny rabbit for Easter and I drew a really excellent rabbit.” I commented, “You've got artistic talent.” This student went on to make a lovely drawing in TuxPaint. This is a boy who has spent hundreds of hours playing first-person shooting games. A few days later, a middle school boy asked how he could use TuxPaint on his computer. Older elementary school students started exploring it in our computer center. Somehow, the word about TuxPaint spread throughout our community. (TuxPaint runs on all computer platforms–Linux, Macintosh, and Windows.) Mom told me the family has a laptop, so I offered to install TuxPaint the next time they visited the library. I explained that TuxPaint was a free program and that the family could use it at home. The mom smiled back and said, “He's three.” “How old is your son?” I inquired politely. ![]() Listening to him speak, I noticed he was highly verbal, too. The child was squealing with delight as he used the various drawing tools in TuxPaint. Last week, I was really happy to see a mother sitting at a computer with her 3-year-old son, with TuxPaint up on the screen. Unfortunately, the GIMP contagion did not spread beyond the students in the class. It was a joy seeing the students continue using GIMP after the class came to an end. A few years ago our library offered a GIMP class for elementary school students. We also have the Inkscape vector drawing program and the GNU Image Manipulation Program-known as the GIMP. Our computers run three very interesting, fun, and useful graphics programs. Very few use the computer for creative graphics applications. About 90 percent of the children use the computers for games, and about 10 percent use them for doing homework. The room in which I spend most of my time has 10 computers, and elementary and middle school students stop by daily after school to use them. I work at a public library with 28 Linux stations made publicly available in four separate rooms.
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