“After I finished my recent articles on Teaching with Tux and
Learning with Gcompris, I received a couple of suggestions from
readers that I take a look at Childsplay. I spent some time looking
at Childsplay and if you have small children, I think you should
too. As soon as I started the program, it started to play it’s
theme song and my 18 month old son came running, and he still comes
running every time he hears that music. For most parents and
educators, my review of this program could end right here, but I
suspect that I should probably write a bit more.“As you can see from Figure 1, Childsplay has 14 different
children’s activities. These activities are geared toward very
young children. My 18 month old son didn’t have the mouse or
keyboard skills necessary to play the games directly, but he
enjoyed sitting on my lap while I “worked” with the program for
this review.“As a reviewer, the first thing I find difficult about the
program is that none of the activities seem to have names, just
icons. So, for the sake of this review, I’ll refer to each activity
by it’s row and column, as shown in Figure 1. And by the way, for
you programmer-geeks like me, rows and columns begin with “1” not
“0”.”