A fantastic little paint programme for younger children (about 3 - 10 I would think). It has colours, text, shapes, brushes and all the other things you would expect to find in a paint programme.

Don't forget to download the additional "stamps" package. This gives loads of small stamps: cars, flowers, planets, animals etc which children can use in their picture. Each of the "stamps" can be resized, and reversed giving loads of useable combinations. Certainly a great paint program to start child off with before they move onto the more complicated ones.

Don't forget to look under the "Magic" button, this contains a lot of items you would expect to find in a paint programme but wouldn't find unless you clicked this button.

This is by far the best childrens paint programme I have found, better than even some of the paid programmes around. Give your kids a treat and download this for them and as a bonus it will keep them quiet for hours :-) As with most software for children you will probably need to spend a little time with them going through it but they should soon be using it totally on their own.

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I can not enthuse enough about this programme. I'm NOT a computer programmer by any stretch of the imagination but both myself and my son have enjoyed working together, and learning together, with this software. It really is the lego of computing, you just drag the programming "blocks" together, if you use the wrong one you just drag it off and replace it with another.

You can use this to build simple games or short cartoons.
Scratch is completely FREE and is being developed at MIT Visit the Scratch site and you will be able to see hundreds of other examples of games and
presentations people have made. You can also download the programme and see plenty of help (forum and help docs). Even better, once you have installed the programme, you can download the "code" for any of the games you see on there so you can see how other people made their games, alter them and/ or improve them for yourself.

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If you fancy a bit of astronomy then this really is a brilliant programme. Made by Microsoft, free but only available to run under Windows. Take a guided tour around the universe, learn about our solar system, its stars and moons.

There is even a guided tour available by Wall-E (separate add on downloadable from the web site).

If you don't want to use the guided tour then it is possible to search for 1,000 of object and get up fairly detailed information on them in addition to the images. This is a great programme, I have had a couple of issues viewing the earth which seems a bit strange although this is probably something I am doing wrong rather than the programme itself. If you are feeling really brave you can try making your own guided tour. Full details on how to do this are available on the web site. If you have children of school age you may want to point this programme out to their teachers / head of IT.

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Whilst not specifically designed for children this is a great Paint programme for them to use.
Tools and features in HeliosPaint currently include:

• Pencil for editing pixels.
• Freehand and straight lines with choice of width, dash pattern, line joint and arrow heads.
• Paint Brush with sizeable head.
• Spray Can with sizeable head or global spray option.
• Paint Can with local and global replace. Colour bleed sensitivity allows nearby similar colours to be painted.
• Shape tool for creating freehand, regular polygon, star, moon and heart shapes.
• Text entry with choice of font, style, underline and rotation.
• HSB/RGB/contrast/gamma adjustment of image.
• Image filters: invert, gray, black and white, colour filter, sharpen, blur, edge feathering, edge detection, oil painting effect, emboss.

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