Step

I’ve found a promising addition to the KDE4 education suite that goes by the name of Step. Step is a physics simulator that’s in development and is scheduled for release with KDE 4.1. It was introduced as a GSoC project and already is fairly complete. After seeing some great screenshots at http://edu.kde.org/step/ I decided to build it in my kde4 development environment site. Since Step is located in playground/edu/step it was easy to add

module playground/edu
end module

to my ~/.kdesvn-buildrc (The configuration for kdesvn-build).

It built perfectly and when I first ran it I was amazed at how complete and polished it already is.

The above screenshot is an example of Step’s graphing and tracing capabilities. (click to enlarge)

I did find a couple of bugs (and submitted them! kde bugs 153594, 153595) which are probably quite easily fixed. Overall, however, Step is quite usable and feature complete and I’m very exited for the final release of this application.