Print Artist Craft Factory
Ages: 5 +

This is not a paint program. There isn't a brush or pencil in sight. This is clip art heaven - 5500 images, indexed by topics. A 180 page book in included that shows all the images and gives instruction on how to use the product. The product is full of craft projects. To name only some; there are templates to make paper airplanes, banners, bookmarks notepaper and envelopes, masks puppets, posters business cards, gift cards and boxes and fold and cut objects to create a town.

The interface design is on a "need to know" basis. Only the buttons that are required for the current activity are shown. Kids should be alerted that they must select something before anything happens. There is a nice use of voice and sound effects. When selecting text, all of the letters are sounded out; help which can be assessed with the right mouse button is vocal and the sound effects probably amuse kids more then they do adults - like the scream when something is trashed. The manipulation is very Mac-like with "handles" for scaling, rotating and skewing. For parents that have already found out how quickly children go through inks for color printers, there is a parent option that will turn printing off do it can be done under their supervision. Images are automatically saved and can be accessed when you return to that category. Adults take note. There are copyright restrictions on some of the images if they are used commercially.

Educational value?: Learning the alphabet, and numbers, names of colors. Handling rudimentary computer functions, X means close, trash can to discard, manipulating handles and zooming - good for future CAD work, drag and drop techniques and the difference between undo and delete Fun value? Making things and surprising your parents Reviewed by Genevieve