Omnitux

Omnitux is an application with several simple games that have the purpose to teach children how to move the mouse, associate colors, letters, animals, geometrical shapes, musical notes and instruments based on sound, spot differences in two similar images, match flags with highlighted countries on a map, and more.

The app gets launched in fullscreen mode and lists the main components in a menu: mouse manipulation, associations, memory cards, jigsaw puzzles, differences, numbers, writing, arts, and geography.

Music is played on the background and you can adjust the volume level from the "Options" area. It's not recommended to disable it due to the audio-based games.

It's possible to adjust the resolution (requires program restart), as well as to switch to another language for the interface: English, Spanish, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese or German.

An important aspect worth noting is that the tool has a basic achievement system: on each completed game it reveals an additional character that exits an igloo (resets on app restart).

The mouse manipulation component supplies children with very simple games concerning animals, vehicles, drawings and landscapes. The goal here is to learn how to accurately move the mouse cursor on the screen.

The system is identical in all four cases: there are three levels of difficulty and five stages that must be completed to finish a game. It's necessary to hover the mouse cursor over each section of the given images (like in a mosaic) in any order. Once the whole image is revealed, the app shows a button for advancing to the next stage.

The difference between the three difficulty levels lies in the number of sections, so the game progresses from "easy" (3x3 large pieces), to "medium" (6x6 medium pieces) and "hard" (10x10 small pieces).

The association games mostly rely on sound and they involve colors, animal sounds and geometric shapes. For example, kids have to click a penguin character to hear a spoken color name, and then drag the associated color to get to the next level.

Likewise, they can hear sounds made by various animals to select the associated animal. There are two difficulty levels for animal sounds and they both involve speech, while two levels are reserved for geometrical shapes (one with speech, one with written text).

The memory cards contain animals, vehicles, numbers and alphabets, while the difficulty level ranges from 4x3 to 5x4 cards to match.

The jigsaw puzzles focus on cartoons, world monuments, only German monuments, landscapes, and paintings. Only two levels of degree are available for cartoons (2x2 and 3x3) and paintings (3x2 and 4x3), while the rest of the puzzle types have four levels (up until 5x5). The pieces can be easily put in place with the mouse cursor.

The spot-the-difference games have cartoons, vehicles and monuments, and kids have to click on the second picture in the spots where they notice a missing or extra element.

The application includes four kinds of counting games with varying levels of degree. Children can view pictures with the same object multiplied and count all occurrences by choosing the answer between the options given, look over several pictures to pick the one which contains the same number of items as the one requested, count from 1 to 9 by moving numbers in the correct order, as well as explore playing cards by dragging the number of symbols over a card with a given numerical value.

When it comes to text exercises, the app can play spoken letters to select the right one, and display a picture with an object along with scrambled letters in order to put them in the required order. It can also show pictures with multiple objects and letters for making associations with the first letter of the object name.

Musical instruments can be learned in the manner previously discussed at associations. Kids may click a question mark to hear the name of an instrument and then pick the answer. Moreover, they can be taught about the musical scale by clicking notes to hear sound and moving them in the correct order on the scale. Regarding geography, they can move monuments in their appropriate location on the world map (or just on Germany or France maps).

Lastly, the program provides a map of Central America and the Caribbean with highlighted countries that must be matched with their flags. It shows flags of countries from the European Union and asks you to select the right country name out of multiple given options, and displays a map of Europe with highlighted members of the European Union, asking you to match them with the given flags.

The tool had a significant impact on system performance during our tests, and extremely slow on Windows 8.1 (it worked smoothly on Windows 7, though). It crashed whenever we attempted to access the "Monuments in France" section from "Arts". It really doesn't live up to the expectations in terms of quality drawings or photographs.

On the bright side, it supports multiple UI languages, a simple but effective achievements system, and some pretty educational and intuitive games for the youngsters which don't require how-to instructions. Too bad that it hasn't been updated for a long time.