Tux Paint is good for introducing young children to ICT skills. It is a widely used and very well thought of program. However quite a few teachers I have met had not heard of it before. This article is an introduction to using Tux Paint in lessons.
If you are new to Tux Paint some explanation is necessary. it is a graphics program for children. It is free to download and use, and it’s Open Source. It can be extended in various ways and modified to fit needs exactly. It is eye-catching, fun, easy to use, and has stereo sound effects. It is quite simply the best graphics program for children that I have seen.
The Windows installer includes a program for configuring Tux Paint that can be accessed from the start menu programs list. On Linux you could search your distribution’s repositories for the ‘tuxpaint-config’ package. Or you can set options (see the manual) on the command line or in a menu editor. Depending on the age and needs of children using the program, there are many options to help tweak it to best advantage.
There are more screenshots and other information on the Tux Paint website. It describes Tux Paint as a “drawing program for children ages 3 to 12″ and while this is certainly generally true I have found that even some two year olds enjoy it a lot. I could also imagine children older than twelve using it well, given the right focus (say using it as a drawing pad to sketch ideas onto their own self-portrait photo* during a Pop Art project).
*Tux paint can be extended by adding user-chosen images as backgrounds, provided they are the right dimensions and format. It is also possible to use your own line drawings as colouring templates and to make your own brushes or ’stamps’ (images for children to use like stickers on their drawings). This is outside the scope of this introduction, though, and I can’t think of anything Tux Paint is seriously lacking, although it’s nice to be given the option to add our own elements if we want/need to.
This image below was made by a ten year old who was just given time to play and to see what happened. One of the special brushes has become the starting point for a story idea as an acrostic poem:
The image below was made by a two year old. You can see decisions were being made about choosing and changing colours (showing understanding of the process of selecting colours) and finding out about what different brushes do.
For very young children I find the following options useful:
–fullscreen –nobuttondistinction –saveovernew –simpleshapes –startblank –noprint
These are options written as they are used on the command line. They are all options in the GUI configuration utility as well though. One by one:
‘Fullscreen’ is useful so children can’t click outside the window or drag it around by accident.
‘No button distinction’ makes the right and left mouse buttons behave the same way; good for encouraging confidence while developing the hand/eye coordination necessary for using a mouse.
‘Save over new’ makes clicking ’save’ always save a new picture even if the same picture has been saved already. This is instead of asking the user if they want to overwrite the older version of the same picture or not.
‘Simple shapes’ disables the possibility of shapes made with the shape tools being rotated. It simplifies things.
‘Start blank’ makes Tux Paint start with a blank background instead of showing the last picture made last session.
‘No print’ disables printing. Its not just being mean; very young children can click buttons by accident or repeatedly. As long as you teach children to press ’save’ selected pictures can be printed later.
All pictures saved in Tux Paint are housed in a folder (you can choose which or accept the default) and pictures are named by date and time as ‘yyyymmddhhmmss.png’ so you can identify who did what and when. It may be helpful to keep a record of who sat at which computer and when, to help with identification of images later.
