EDUCATIONAL SOFTWARES FOR KIDS

Children's learning and home learning

An immense number of titles, probably running into the thousands, were developed and released from the mid-1990s onwards, aimed primarily at the home education of younger children. Later iterations of these titles often began to link educational content to school curricula (such as England’s National Curriculum). The design of educational software programmes for home use has been influenced strongly by computer gaming concepts – in other words, they are designed to be fun as well as educational. However as far as possible a distinction should be drawn between proper learning titles (such as these) and software where the gaming outweighs the educational value (described later).

The following are examples of children’s learning software which have a structured pedagogical approach, usually orientated towards literacy and numeracy skills.

ClickN KIDS, Research based phonics and spelling software titles

Disney Interactive learning titles based on characters such as Winnie-the-Pooh, Aladdin, The Jungle Book and Mickey Mouse.

GCompris, contains numerous activities, from computer discovery to science

Knowledge Adventure’s JumpStars and Blaster Learning System series

The learning Company’s Reader Rabbit, The Clue Finders and Zoombinis series.

Ergonomic hardware is fundamental for baby learning, where Tablet PCs  and touchscreens are preferly used instead of keyboards and computer mice. Also, a closed environment is created, to inhabilitate the use of the keyboard (excepting some combination of keys that can only be typed by and adult), taskbar and opening of other programs and screens.

Some dedicated baby and child computers can additionally parents' explicitly allowed Java programs and USB devices (that can also be used to connect to the adult's computer).