ZAC (Zone for Autistic Children) is a Windows-only web browser designed specifically for children with autism (and other developmental disorders). The browser acts like a sandbox to isolate the children from things like Youtube, lolcats, and NSFW content, while providing access to educational games and resources that are particularly helpful.
ZAC has 5 main sections. It opens with a comforting, screensaver-like aquarium complete with fish, coral, and bubbles. There is a television section that lets the child select from video clips that come from Disney, Sesame Street, Pink Panther, etc.
The games section has a wide array of interactive (and mostly educational) games like Artbot Jr. where we were able to make a dazzling colored picture of a princess. A music area allows children to do things like play virtual instruments and listen to Wiggles songs. A story section rounds out the browser where children can listen to a birdie read nursery rhymes (with interaction) or make a lemonade stand with Elmo.
The ZAC browser is available as a Windows installer or a Windows .exe that requires no install (good for a portable drive).
Where do you go when you know your kids love to watch online video content, but you're worried about what they might be seeing on YouTube? Totlol is a community-moderated video site for 6 month to 6 year olds, and they're hoping you'll think of them when it comes to kid vids. The moderators seem to be doing a good job gathering an age-appropriate collection of YouTube videos, although a few grown-ups at Download Squad might lose some sleep over a certain terrifying singing gummy bear.
The question that comes to mind about Totlol isn't whether they're succeeding at filtering YouTube, though. It's whether YouTube really needs to be filtered by an independent service. We figure that if your kids are on the younger side of Totlol's target age range, they're not going to be watching alone, and if they're a little older, they'll be able to figure out how to get to YouTube on their own -- especially with the YouTube logo on all of Totlol's embedded videos.
Google for educators is a landing spot for classroom resources that incorporate Google products like Google Earth, SketchUp, Maps, and Sky. The site offers everything from simple links to the aforementioned products, to classroom activities for various K-12 grade levels.
There are downloadable PDF posters covering Google search tips for kids, Google Scholar, Book Search, and Google Earth, and there are activities that utilize various media like PDFs, wikis, podcasts, and websites. These activities are organized by grade level: K-5, 6-12, and "all levels."
The Google for educators site also links to their "teacher community" which is a Google group filled with threads about using the many Google offerings in a school classroom.
Doozla is a drawing application (Mac OS X only) designed for children from Plasq, the geniuses behind Skitch and Comic Life. There are 4 main ways to use Doozla: free drawing on a plain white background, drawing on a webcam capture, drawing on one of the included background pictures, and coloring-book mode.
The interface is fullscreen and child friendly since it provides large icons and a simple feature set. There are standard tools like a color chooser, eraser, paint bucket, and ellipse tool, and clicking any of the tools triggers a jolly voice to vocalize the name of the tool or color that was chosen.
Unfortunately Doozla only saves drawings in .doozla files (not .jpgs, .gifs, etc.), so it's not very easy to share creations. However, you can print the drawing to a standard printer or to a PDF.
Doozla costs $24.95, but a 30-day trial is available.
Parents know there are plenty of Web sites where children can waste time hone their fine motor skills playing games. But what about sites that actually teach kids something? They're out there, and here's proof.
Spelling City caught our eye because it's a nice departure from the typical shrill, flashy Web sites and doesn't rely on talking iguanas or silly voice-overs. It's got a bunch of different ways for kids to test their spelling chops, including interactive games, printables, and a tool that speaks any words kids are unsure how to pronounce. Spelling City has more than 25,000 words in its database but visitors can also create and save word lists of their own. C-O-O-L. Timez Attack is one of the best free downloadable math games we've seen. A cross between Quake (without the violence) and Myst, players must solve multiplication equations to defeat monsters and get around the cave. Since most of us around here have already mastered our times tables, we tested the game on three kids, who declare it "awesome."
Starfall is a popular Web site for new or struggling readers. It uses Flash-based movies and interactive games to help kids learn phonics, vowel sounds, and other reading basics. In addition to word recognition, Starfall also teaches kids to read with tone, inflection, and expression.
Since there are about 70 gajillion educational sites out there, it was hard to narrow it down to only three. Parents, what are some of your favorites?
What do Linux gaming, jumbo shrimp, and government intelligence have in common with each other? Think back to your English classes. (We're not responsible for any traumatic memories that surface from this exercise.) Got it yet? Anyone?
Oxymorons. No, no, wait, we're not insulting you. Those little phrases are all oxymorons. If the memories of your English classes were too painful to bear, the quick and dirty explanation of an oxymoron is two words placed together to describe something that seemingly contradict each other.
We're reasonably sure you see the oxymoron in jumbo shrimp, and government intelligence. Linux gaming? Well, we guess it all depends on how you define Linux... and gaming.
A job posting on Gamasutra suggests Amazon will soon start a PC game download store to compliment Unbox, its video-on-demand service, and the site's MP3 download store. The job posting asks programmer/engineers to apply to become a part of the Software and Video Games Digital Technology Team at Amazon, which is "responsible for digital distribution of software and video game products from the Amazon website, including the newly launched Amazon Software Download store."
The job posting itself is unsurprising as Amazon recently launched the software branch of its download services, but the job post includes the bit about the distribution of "video game products," which is currently not happening at the Amazon Software Download Store. The only software presently available from the very new service is unfortunately tax software.
But fear not! We're sure a few competent souls will apply, molding the new service into a very happy reality for those of us that hate visiting and supporting major retail stores like Best Buy and Circuit City.
We were surprised to find an interesting time waster on the BBC's website, of all places. Microlife doesn't fall neatly into a game category. Essentially you play God, and control the lives of tiny microlife, which are single-cell organisms that move around slowly.
You feed them, and can train them to become warriors to defend their nest, but you have to be careful to keep an eye on your funds. Each microlife goes through a life cycle, starting as an infant, moving through middle age where it spends the majority of its time (and lays eggs if you're lucky) then becomes elderly and ultimately dies. Illnesses can also befall your little critters, so ensuring that they stay healthy is also your responsibility.
In the early levels you get to try your hand at raising little microlife without having to worry about the evil Catchers, but later on these predators come looking for a snack, so you have to make sure to have Warriors trained up to fend them off.
Microlife is well designed to slowly introduce new game concepts as the levels progress, and keep you addicted. This time waster can eat up an hour easily, so consider yourself warned before you click. But you're going to anyway, aren't you? You know you are.
Toonlet is a free web based comic strip creator that allows you to create a comic strip starring a cartoon person or persons that you design yourself and then send your finished strip to friends.
In order to create your own strip you have to first create characters. The character builder on the site has a massive amount of body parts, hair, and clothing to choose from and unlike other similar character builders all of the parts can be adjusted in size as well as moved around. You're probably not going to make a character that looks exactly like you, but you can probably get pretty close.
Once you create an original version of your character you have the option to create additional version of the same character experiencing different emotions. For instance after we created "normal" Emily we went ahead and created a "surprised" Emily as well by changing the eyes and mouth on the current creation.
Tower Bloxx is a game of precision, timing, and stacking. It allows you to take that skill that you learned as a baby (stacking blocks), and use it in a quick and mildly entertaining little flash game on your computer.
The concept is that you are building an apartment tower out of identical blocks. Each block swings from a crane above, and your job is to pick the exact right moment to click and release the block so that it lands on top of the previous block a squarely as possible. The more square your block lands, the more people fly in from the sides using umbrellas as wings and take up residence in the block you just dropped. Stacking them exactly on top of one another will generate bonus points.
As the tower gets taller, it starts to sway, meaning you have a swinging block that you have to time to land on a moving target. In one quick game we were able to stack up 67 blocks in the quick game, but knowing our readers we're sure you'll be able to annihilate that score in short order. Post your tallest number of blocks stacked, and your high scores here for bragging rights or so that the rest of us can point and laugh at you.
This one is a bit of a mind-bender. in Cursor*10, your goal is to make it to the 16th floor by finding and clicking on the staircase in each room. The interesting aspect is that you get 10 chances, and with each chance you get to use a specific cursor. Once your time runs out, you start with the next cursor, but the previous cursor is along for the ride. In other words, it remembers exactly what you did last time, and does it again.
It becomes quite a race when you have seven or eight other cursors zooming around from room to room, and in the later stages part of the challenge becomes simply identifying the cursor that you are controlling. But games aren't fun without a little challenge, right?
Cursor*10 isn't going to win any beauty awards, but it's an interesting concept done well.
The internet is full of many wonderful things. However, it is also host to any number to bad influences that parents dread their children being exposed to. Because of this, many companies produce filtering software in an effort to help protect children from profanity.
Glubble's approach is a little different. Rather than make a futile attempt at blocking everything bad on the internet, it uses a whitelist of sites that are ok for kids to see. It brings together a community of parents, allowing the user to set a pre-defined white list and even use the whitelists of other users. It's the same sort of powerful social design that make add-ons like Adblock+ so effective.
Not only is Glubble great at keeping kids' online time rated G, but it also gives Firefox a much more appealing and user friendly look, giving every member of the family an individualized login and portal page, even for the Adults.
Glubble works on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and can be downloaded directly here.
If you've been looking for a way to get your kids to hate you, we are proud to inform you that the wait is over. It's called Shvoong Homework and it's worse than detention. Calling itself "the world-wide notebook for all your school needs" it fails to actually address any of them.
It begins innocently enough. You sign up for a Shvoong Homework account, give them your e-mail and nickname, and you're ready to Shvoong with the best of them. You are then presented with three options: edit your timetable, edit your notebooks, or connect with your friends that also use Shvoong Homework.
There are so many things wrong with this picture it's hard to know where to begin. The timetable is a virtually worthless feature because kids memorize their class schedule within a week anyway. The notebook feature is an awkwardly implemented document editor and homework uploader (and has a little image of Cartman smiling at you - we suppose that means it's kid friendly). As for the friends feature, supposedly you can share your homework answers with other friends. Great. Have your kids spend their time uploading their homework to Shvoong Homework instead of actually doing it.
And if that isn't enough to get your kids to beg you to punish them with anything, but please, not the Shvoong, then the made-in-2001 design and horrible interface will turn them into straight A students. Oh yes, it's still in beta, but you probably shouldn't get your hopes up.
NORAD's Santa Tracker is back, and with only four days till the big day, the NORAD website has many fun things for your kids (and you, we won't tell). We've mentioned the site in previous years; Thankfully, there will be no semi-celebrity greetings section this year.
Visitors can take a stroll through Santa's North Pole village and click on the downtown shops for fun games and activities. Including Mrs. Claus' Alphabet soup typing test, an illustrated PDF Elf story and a snowboarding game.
After using Microsoft Visual Earth for last year's high-tech tracking, this year NORAD will display it's tracking info via Google Earth. Last year, Google provided its own tracking data, unaffiliated with NORAD. An iGoogle module is also available so you can track Santa from the comfort of your Google homepage.
The Santa Tracking Control Center kicks off operations on 2:00am MTN Christmas Eve and lets you track Santa live as he navigates the globe. If you're left wondering, as we were, why the multi-billion dollar NORAD defense operation would burn time and resources tracking harmless lil' Santa Claus, there's actually a rich and storied history behind it all.
Posted Dec 19th 2007 10:00AM by Todd Ritter Filed under: Kids
On Monday Slashdot reported that a Pennsylvania high school student had received two hours of detention for using the powerful Firefox web browser to do his classwork while in school. The original blog posting (including a scan of the detention letter) was dugg over 8000 times and outcry ensued. Turns out, the scanned letter was altered (Photoshop anyone?) and a response from the school principal implies that the student received detention for engaging in "non-academic activities."
Just because Firefox is amazing does not mean students should be able to violate a school district's acceptable use policy for the computer network. The outcry was spurred by thoughts like "Firefox is better than IE, how could the school district be so foolish!" or "open-source software is better than closed source, so that teacher is dumb!" In reality, the matter is much more simple. Whether the student was using Firefox or a college prep software package, if he is not permitted to use certain software based on district policy, then he should be disciplined.
ZAC (Zone for Autistic Children) is a Windows-only web browser designed specifically for children with autism (and other developmental disorders). The browser acts like a sandbox to isolate the children from things like Youtube, lolcats, and NSFW content, while providing access to educational games and resources that are particularly helpful.
Google for educators
What do Linux gaming, jumbo shrimp, and government intelligence have in common with each other? Think back to your English classes. (We're not responsible for any traumatic memories that surface from this exercise.) Got it yet? Anyone?
We were surprised to find an interesting time waster on the BBC's website, of all places. 
Tower Bloxx
This one is a bit of a mind-bender. in 
