|
This is a talking word processor and illustration program for 4 to 10 year olds designed to let children create stories, illustrate them, and then print them or play them back visually and audibly. The program generates speech using the computer's own speaker or any Ad Lib or Sound Blaster compatible music card. Unless you have a music card, the quality of the speech depends pretty much on the quality of your speaker and how noisy your computer's fan is. But it's usually understandable. Kid Works contains a variety of tools, including a large-character word processor that can magically turn words into pictures. For example, if your child types, "The girl rode her bike up the mountain and saw a rabbit," a keystroke will automatically turn "bike," "mountain" and "rabbit" into tiny drawings called icons, or turn them back into words again. There are more than 200 icons in the program's vocabulary, and youngsters can create their own icons, assign them to words and even teach the computer how to pronounce them correctly. An elementary paint module also lets children create larger illustrations. This is a superb program for early readers and writers. |
