We have been looking for a Free and Open Source typing application for kids for quite some time. We found TuxTyping appealing and decided to localize the interface and the 43 typing exercises that come with it into Chinese. TuxTyping is an educational typing tutor for kids starring Tux, the Linux penguin. This educational game comes with two different games for practicing typing, and allows you to create exercises according to students needs. Of course we already brought this good news to Wende School. After two hours of training, Miss Liu  was already mastering TuxTyping. She will incorporate it into the school program starting from 2010.

Fred is now submitting the Chinese version upstream to make it available for everybody.  The TuxTyping developers have been very responsive and helpful with our translation problems and fixing minor bugs we found. We are now even working with them to make it workable for Chinese input method, as only pinyin typing is available currently. Hopefully we will have something ready to test soon.

In no time thanks to volunteers and passionate people like us, we went from nothing available in Chinese to a great looking software that will even deal with the Chinese language specificities. That’s the reason why I love Open Source; its community and its spirit definitely ROCK!