KDE Edu Applications Strike in Qt Contest
Today QtForum.org, a site dedicated to Qt development discussions, presented the winners of the QtForum.org programming contest award, sponsored by Trolltech. The contest selected the best educational software written with the Qt libraries, and these two programs from the KDE Edutainment Project took first and second prize, while third place was shared among two also KDE-based applications.
The first prize was awarded to KStars, the outstanding deskop plantarium. Kig, the KDE interactive geometry application made the second place.
"Both KStars and Kig are beautiful, smart, well written, and wise and enjoyable teachers of timeless subjects of interest and importance to every age. Both are first class in every respect, going far beyond their peers in implementation and ideology", said Trolltech's Scott Collins.
KStars, a desktop planetarium program, took the $1500 first prize. "On behalf of the KStars team, I'd like to thank the contest judges and Trolltech," said lead developer Jason Harris. "This recognition of our work is extremely exciting and gratifying. The KStars team decided before entering the contest that we would donate any prize money to KDE e.V. We feel strongly that we should use our success to nurture the further development of KDE, without which KStars would never have been possible. Thank you very much to our users and fellow kde-edu developers; you've all had a part in KStars."
Kig, a program for exploring geometric constructions, took the $750 second prize. Maintainer Dominique Devriese was amazed: "The Kig team and myself feel very proud of winning this prize. Of course, we would have liked to come in first, but winning against KStars could never have felt right ;). My personal thanks go out to the rest of the fantastic Kig team (Maurizio and Pino to name two) and furthermore, we'd like to thank Kig users and bug reporters, all KDE-Edu people, the contest jury and TrollTech and all of our fellow open source developers."
The third place was shared by another two KDE educational applications: Keymaster, a typing teacher, convinced the judges while vocabulary trainer KSalomon amazed the community. Both were awarded $500.