Steve Bass's Home Office: More Fun With Kids and Your PC

Puzzles, Mojoworld, the universe, plus Finders Keepers.

Steve Bass

Last week I told you about some great tutorials, educational games, and learning programs--applications to help your kids do better in school and give you a way to get closer to them. To refresh your memory, check out last week's article.

Having spent 15 years doing therapy as a Marriage and Family Counselor, I know there are other topics that kids are struggling to learn. So I found a few more programs to help children--and you--learn and grow. Hey, I can almost hear your synapses snapping to attention.

Riddle Me This, Batman

Youngsters, and many programmers I know, need to develop motor skills--for instance, hand and eye coordination. Others need to make sense of spatial relationships. (Don't get me started on programmers and social relationships, okay?) I found some good games that can enhance a child's skills in both areas. Unless I say otherwise, all of these games are available for a free trial period, and can be purchased if you find them useful.

Animated Puzzles: Puzzle games can boost a youngster's ability to think spatially. Animated Puzzles ($15) supplies more than 50 jigsaw puzzles, and each can be scrambled into 12, 24, 48, or 96 pieces. When the puzzle's completed, the player is rewarded with a 3D animation.

Sean's Magic Slate: This free spatial development coloring game for 3-to-7-year-olds relies on moving, sizing, deleting, and reflecting objects on ready-to-color or randomly colored backgrounds.

Animated Coloring: For $15 this game provides the chance to play around with animation and, for the younger set, differentiate among 1000 colors. Once the picture is colored in, a click animates it, bringing it to life with sounds and motion.

Dig this: Mojoworld is a 3D terrain generating program that, whether you're an adult or computer literate teenager, will knock your socks off. The free Transporter lets you explore, modify, and fiddle with digitally rendered planets. If you spend a while (easily half the day), you can begin modifying the planet's characteristics and create your own movies of it. This, folks, is a time killer par excellence. (Be warned: The software is an 8MB download and you need a PC with a 600-MHz processor, a 16MB 3D graphics board, and 200MB free on your hard drive.) Once you've got the Transporter, download SinewWorld, a neat-o planet.

Watch and Observe

Young children often have trouble focusing and maintaining attention for more than a few minutes. I found two programs that help keep kids' attention while focusing on memory and pattern recognition. I also found a great phonics game.

Dino Tiles: This matching game helps enhance pattern recognition and memory in 5- to 9-year-olds. The player is shown a series of digital dinosaurs, each accompanied by sounds and music. The goal is to click on the tiles that match. It's free to try, and costs only $10 to keep.

Finders Keepers: In Finders Keepers, a $4 program (really!), the player flips cards over one at a time. If the picture matches, the program responds with a happy child's voice; otherwise the player is encouraged to try again.

Animated Beginning Phonics: This is a nifty program for youngsters in kindergarten, first, or second grade. For $22 (free to try), Phonics shows them the difference between beginning and ending sounds, middle short vowel sounds, and upper- and lowercase letters--something many adult e-mail writers have trouble grasping. Children get help figuring out words and letters with sound and more than 200 3D pictures.

Once you've tried Animated Beginning Phonics, visit the company's Web site for more learning tools.

Look, Up in the Sky!

Astro-Mania: This game helps you explain the planets, stars, and universe to kids without embarrassing yourself. (Of course, I don't need it; I already know that Venus is after Saturn--or is it Mercury?) It's free to try and costs $15 to use it through infinity or forever, whichever comes first.

Exploring Weather: Why's the sky blue? Where, pray tell, is the most rainfall? If the kiddies are asking these questions, you'd better get your weather together, pal. Exploring Weather can help you to a limited extent. This freebie quizzes you about meteorology, the atmosphere, and earth systems. While the program's content is terrific, the interface is kind of old and clunky. If you prefer slick programs, skip Exploring Weather.

Quick tip: Did you know that when you visit a Web site, instead of downloading an executable file and saving it to disk, you can run it right from the Internet? That's not handy for large files, and it doesn't work with zipped files, but it's a timesaver for some small tools. Try it with Pop-Up Stopper, a free utility that brings to a halt browser windows that pop up in front of your screen. Select "Run this Program from its Current Location" to start the install immediately. Cool, no?

Look Back in Time

Ally 2: Ben Franklin Adventure: Besides flying a kite during a storm, what else was Ben Franklin famous for? (Nope, not just for being on the back of old half-dollars.) Ally 2: Ben Franklin Adventure is a card game that lets you learn about Ben's time period and his 13 virtues. Correct answers earn points and an opportunity to discuss Ben Franklin with the kiddies. The shareware version has five levels; once you register, you can view all 55 levels, including chats with other historical characters. It's free to try and costs $20 to keep. (To give yourself an edge, check out Ben Franklin Facts before you play the game.)

Shakespeare Trivia: If the kids are in high school, there's a good chance they're reading Shakespeare (or at least trying to). You might be able to help cajole them into paying more attention with the Shakespeare Trivia game. The author's taken 37 plays, 1200 characters (not the ASCII kind), 400 scenes, and 500 quotations, and created questions to see how much you know. It's free to try and costs $20 to keep.

Music and Spelling

A Musical Tutorial: Take the youngsters on a musical tour and maybe help them grasp the fundamentals of treble, bass, and chords. The Musical Tutorial, a $20 program, lets you and your musical progeny learn how to count time and play scales, while getting hints along the way. You can also print chords and scales, and listen to a Beethoven classic.

Animated Spelling: For $20 (free to try), Animated Spelling lets children hear a word and try to match it up with a word on screen. A second game helps kids learn how to spell the words. The program has more than 700 words, with almost 70 animations that reward correct answers.

Dig this: Are you worried about black helicopters? Don't be. There's a more insidious plot occurring in the United States with--are you sitting down?--white vans. No, no, it's true: I saw it on the Web.

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