Kid Works Deluxe

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Buried Treasure

A Review of Kid Works Deluxe

John Butterfield

Kid Works Deluxe is the direct descendent of Kid Works 2, that wonderful writing/drawing program for kids from Davidson and Associates. The heart of that happy program beats somewhere in this updated, Internet-aware application – but you’ll need the user’s manual, cheat sheets, practice and luck to find it.

Spend some time with the instruction book before you turn your kids loose at the keyboard. The advance effort will pay off in helping them discover all the features hidden beneath an interface that seems designed to obfuscate rather than elucidate. If you penetrate its arcane mysteries, you and your children will discover a feature-packed array of options.

KDW strives to be the integrated application of the playground set. You’ve got a word processor that prints out your story in a variety of fonts. You’ve got an art program with which to create paintings, stickers and animation. You can combine them into a multimedia storybook with sounds, character voices and animation. And you can launch them into the Internet, e-mailing them to friends while you download their creations. So what’s not to like?

Quite a bit, actually. In its bid to gussy update Kid Works 2, which was showing its age (but retaining its intuitive ease of use), Davidson has taken a terrific tool and turned it into a toy.

Running Kid Works Deluxe on a CD-ROM (Kid Works 2 came on a CD-ROM, but was installed and run off a hard drive) gives Davidson the ability to pack more options into the program.
That’s good for spurring children’s imagination. But in order to reach the options, one must penetrate a confusing, cartoonish interface.

Once you’re in the clubhouse (I think the only kids’ clubhouses actually in use these days are on CD-ROMs), a variety of clickable hot spots lead you into the program.

OK, let’s try to start, shall we? Hmm, a book on a stump, labeled " new book. " So we click that to begin.
Well, yes – if you’re starting a story from scratch. But if you want to open a story you created previously, where to go?
The easel labeled " Setup, " perhaps? No, that’s the parent’s-only way to set up the Internet email connection your kids require if they’re to send their opus through the ether.
So let’s try for information. Just click on the …. on the what? The telephone hanging from the ceiling? No, that’s to dial up your Internet service provider (see " Setup, above. ").
The TV? No, that’s credits for the creators. The boombox? No, that’s another parental control device, to toggle the sound on and off.
Oh yeah, that’s right – the cellular phone on the floor! It launches mini-movies of an annoying actor dressed like a Saturday Night Live Killer Bee.

Yes, it’s all right there in the cheery manual, which walks you through creation of new this and new that.
But to me, one of the hallmarks of quality educational programming is that it encourages exploration. It rewards the search for information. Kid Works Deluxe seems determined to complicate the search. Moving from writing to drawing to recording to e-mailing requires memorization of a roadmap.
And then Kid Works Deluxe compliates matters by making the landmarks look alike.
The navigating is a little better once you’re actually inside the writing and art programs. Kids will find a book in which they can write their stories and illustrate them. They can work from scratch on both words and pictures, or utilize more than 100 " story starter ideas" (themed starting points such as poetry, greeting cards, letters, etc.), over 100 animations, a variety of painting tools, more than 450 stickers, 140 illustration starters, and more than 100 sound effects.

Lots of possibilities here. Write your own stories, make your own illustrations, use the art and ideas as a starting point or take off into the imagination stratosphere. Record your own narration, design your own stickers, put it all together ….

Wait a minute. Better make that " Write your own short stories. " Or rather, short chapters.
The reason: Kid Works Deluxe won’t " wrap" its stories from the end of one page to the beginning of the next.
This means, of course, that your kids had better be able to express their thoughts in bites the size of one small page of large type.
As an example, I was able to type the sentence, " Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their countrymen " 2 1/2 times on a page before it bounced against the one-page barrier.
This, of course, is just fine if your talking about a kids’ story book. But it knocks Kid Works Deluxe right out of the box as something that can grow with a child.

I know – you shouldn’t knock a program for not being what it’s not designed to be. Kid Works Deluxe is billed as a " multimedia creativity kit for children ages four to nine that builds writing, reading and creativity skills, and offers the excitement of Internet communications. "

So: You’ve got a program aimed straight at the younger set, but with an interface that requires a book and a parent along for the ride in order to understand.
You’ve got a writing tool that builds writing, reading and creativity skills – as long as they don’t build into ideas that don’t need to be expressed on more than one page. And you’ve got Internet access – but only if you already have a direct Internet connection, which is a finicky beast for adults to tame, let alone kids firing their creations off into the ozone.

It’s too bad, because, as with Kid Works 2, the graphics portion of the program is great fun: cool tools, bright and cheery colors, fun stickers and coloring-book pages.
It’s so good, in fact, that one might consider buying Kid Works Deluxe strictly as a kid-friendly draw-and-paint program, and find it a bargain at $35.

But as they say, review what’s offered, not what’s not – and what’s offered is a confusing interface masking a powerful program with several crippling flaws.

School House Scorecard

Product:	Kid Works Deluxe
Company:	Davidson and Associates P.O. Box 2961 Torrance, CA 90509 E-MAIL: sales - sales@davd.com; technical support – support@davd.com Internet: www.davd.com AOL KEYWORD: Davidson
Cost:	$35.00

System Requirements:

Macintosh:
LC, II, Performa, Centris, Quadra, Powerbook, or Power Mac;
256-color graphics with 14-inch monitor;
double-speed CD-ROM or faster; 8 MB of RAM (4.6 MB free);
hard disk; System 7.0 or better;
microphone and printer highly recommended.

PC:
33 MHz 486 (or faster) computer, 256-color SVGA graphics;
double-speed (or faster) CD-ROM;
sound card (Windows compatible); hard disk; 8 MB of RAM;
Windows 3.1 or higher; mouse;
microphone and printer highly recommended.

Breakdown:

Ease of Use 1
Learning Value 3
Entertainment Value 3
Graphics 4
Sound 4

Overall Score: