Click the parachutes in order, before they splash down.

Kids want to grow up fast, but that’s no reason to start them playing World of Warcraft at age 5. Age-appropriate MMO Driving Kids lets them cruise around a friendly city, making friends and playing games. Developer Albymedia, based in Belarus, specializes in “edutainment” software, and Driving Kids was created with the help of teachers and early-childhood development consultants. Better yet, there’s nothing to install—you can play in any Flash-enabled browser.

The game is aimed at 4- to 7-year-olds, so it’s full of bright primary colors and large flashing buttons to click. Players use the mouse to move their avatar, who starts out riding a skateboard, around the map, clicking the cartoony icons to launch minigames. A friendly robot explains the minigames’ rules out loud, so kids don’t need to know how to read to get the gist. Still, they might need someone older to interpret the instructions and point them in the right direction.

Use the colored pencils to re-create the drawing on the left.

The minigames let kids practice soft skills like pointing and clicking, recognizing patterns, matching like items, and listening to and following directions. They’ll guide a bus through a maze, match trucks and trains by color, identify matching musical tones, scoop up trash that’s polluting the ocean, complete puzzles and Memory-style games, and dump water from a helicopter to grow mushrooms to feed hedgehogs. (Yeah, don’t ask about that last one.)

While most of the minigames seem just right for the target age group, some of them were so hard, we adults had to give up: the house-building game from the Hydro Tilt level, for example. A minigame that had us tracing numerals by dragging the mouse was hampered by delayed input. And the taxi race suffered from unintuitive controls—the Up arrow always moves you forward, even if your car is pointed in the down, right, or left direction.

Players earn Auro, the in-game currency, then spend it on flashier vehicles or fancy paint jobs. What might be a trickier concept for younger kids to grasp is that the minigames also cost you Auro to play. If you pay 20 Auro as “ante” and then only earn 20 Auro with your performance, obviously you broke even. But if you quit a game in the middle, you’ll earn zero Auro and your total goes down.

Making friends in the game world—the developer says more than 10,000 users have registered.

Driving Kids has a social component too—you’ll encounter other players in the game world, and you can make friends with up to 50 of them. (No personal information is shared.) Players can chat with each other—Albymedia promises these chats are heavily moderated—and display cheerful emoticons above their avatars’ heads. A few multiplayer minigames are scattered around too, which you can only access if another Driving Kids user is there to play against you.

Mostly everything works great, except for a few glitches: A couple of times, we’d click the robot for instructions, and he wouldn’t talk to us. (Was it something we said?) And occasionally a minigame would freeze up if we clicked outside the browser window (selecting the Finder or another app) and then came back to it.

Parents can feel confident their children are safe interacting with this world, although they should still stay close—younger kids might need some help. We recommend starting with a one-month subscription to see if Driving Kids will stay parked at your house.

COMPANY: Albymedia
CONTACT: www.drivingkids.com
PRICE: Free; premium accounts from $4.95 per month
REQUIREMENTS: Web browser with Flash (works with both Safari 2 and Firefox 3)
Educational minigames for kids ages 4 to 7. Heavily moderated chat with other players in the game world. Colorful graphics and cute music. More minigames will be added. No software to install.
Lots of loading screens. Some games might be tricky for little kids. Occasional glitches.