Entertain and educate the most important members of your household with this family-friendly guide to the best Mac software, websites, and iPhone apps for kids. And don’t miss our step-by-step instructions for setting up parental controls on your Mac. Let’s play!

When they’re little, kids want to be just like you--pretending to drive the car, borrowing your shoes for dress-up, and yes, pulling up a booster seat to unwind with the family Mac after a hard day in the sandbox. As fun as some Mac staples are regardless of age (Photo Booth, anyone?), your kids deserve some special software just for them--to help them master basic computer skills, stretch their creative imaginations, reinforce educational concepts, and of course, just have a grand old time no matter how young they are. With that in mind, we test-drove 29 Mac and iPhone apps and 12 activity-packed websites just for kids. Some wound up being a little too dumbed down--on the verge of becoming, well, dumb--and our reviews separate the wheat from that chaff for you. Grab the mouse; it’s time to play!

Computer Skills

KidsMouse

KidsMouse teaches basic mouse skills with 18 learning games like ABC Puzzle, Color Ball, and Shape Puzzle. Each is operated using only the mouse or trackpad, and the brightly colored, charmingly illustrated graphics will delight little ones. Some of the games test your child’s sequencing (letters and numbers), shape recognition, and memory, while others just entertain--a bitmap paint program, for example, lets them draw colorful shapes. Really little kids might need prompting from Mom or Dad--ours had fun driving from our lap. We just wished KidsMouse would lock out keyboard input because those keys sure get banged on.

Click matching shapes to hear a sound. Mee-yow!

KidsMouse
COMPANY: WhiteRoom-Web
CONTACT: www.whiteroom-web.com
PRICE: $15
REQUIREMENTS: 500MHz or faster G3 or later processor, Mac OS 10.4 or later

Lots of different activities for little kids to master. Colorful and engaging.

Keyboard remains active, so keep little ones away from keys.

BumperCar

A web browser specifically for preschoolers and older kids, BumperCar has built-in safeguards to keep kids away from the unsavory stuff. Parents or teachers first define BumperCar’s safety settings, then kids can surf with the same WebKit technology behind Safari. You can block profanity, filter search engine results, prevent kids from entering personal data, and maintain a whitelist (approved sites) and a blacklist (forbidden ones). You can even limit surfing to specific hours of the day or a specific duration. A fun interface featuring a bumper car and a “tunnel of mystery” (a random selection) greets younger kids; older ones are gently directed to pick from a variety of categories. We found a few dead links, but there was still plenty for kids to explore.

Kids can bump around the web without getting hurt.

BumperCar
COMPANY: Freeverse
CONTACT: www.freeverse.com
PRICE: $29.95
REQUIREMENTS: G3 or better processor, Mac OS 10.4 or later

Safe web browsing for kids.

Some dead links.

Scratch

It’s one thing for kids to use software, but teaching them to produce it is another thing entirely. Scratch, developed by MIT’s world-famous Media Lab, introduces kids to computer programming. They can assemble their programs using scripts, each made up of individual building blocks that tell Scratch what to do. Examples include simple animations, simulations, games, and more--MIT even has a Scratch site where users have shared more than half a million of their own projects. Your kids can’t use Scratch to make the next Doom or World of Warcraft, but they’ll better understand the fundamentals of programming, and you won’t spend a dime. Built-in help screens and a reference guide will help young programmers get started, and the active online community will inspire them to strive for the next level. Our only gripe is the very un-Mac-like interface should be much better than it is.

Kids younger than 8 will probably need help--Scratch is aimed at 8- to 16-year-olds.

Scratch
COMPANY: MIT Media Lab
CONTACT: www.scratch.mit.edu
PRICE: Free
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.4 or later

Teaches fundamentals of programming. Big online community.

Un-Mac-like interface.

OK-Writer

Syndicomm’s OK-Writer replaces the all-business word processor with one aimed at kids. Complete with sound effects and a toolbar that wraps most of the way around the document, it gives young writers six fonts (including that typographical monstrosity Comic Sans) and simple formatting. They can also save, print, and open documents, or have them read aloud using Mac OS X’s text-to-speech feature.

The idea is that regular word processors are too difficult or intimidating for kids, and it’s true that Microsoft Word and even Apple’s Pages have tool palettes and options that can be bewildering to even an adult. And at $10, OK-Writer is cheaper than either. But most kids fare perfectly well with TextEdit, the basic text editor that comes with Mac OS X, which makes us think that OK-Writer is simply a solution in search of a problem.

That's a lot of buttons for not a lot of formatting options.

OK-Writer
COMPANY: Syndicomm
CONTACT: www.syndicomm.com
PRICE: $10
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.3 or later

Simplified interface less daunting than a full word processor. Inexpensive.

A simplified text editor is already included with Mac OS X.

TuxType

The fun exercises in TuxType test kids’ ability to find keys on the keyboard by having them type words on the screen. In Fish Cascade, letter-adorned fish stream down the screen, and your goal is to type the letters before Tux the Penguin eats the fish (the letters give him a bellyache). Comet Zap is pretty much the same, but naturally, with comets.

On the downside, TuxType lacks a tutorial structure to help kids learn basic keyboarding techniques, such as home-row finger positioning. And while you can modify the word lists and other aspects of the app (it is, after all, open source), you have to know how to manipulate Mac OS X app package contents, which may be more trouble than it’s worth to less-techy parents and teachers.

Don't ask why this penguin's in the mountains; just type!

TuxType
COMPANY: Tux4Kids
CONTACT: www.tux4kids.alioth.debian.org
PRICE: Free
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.4 or later

Two different exercises. Can't beat the price!

No keyboarding tutorials.

Next Page: Creativity >>