Art applications are for drawing free-hand pictures, designing floor plans, making maps, or just plain doodling.

The nice thing about electronic drawing is that you can edit your work. You can correct mistakes, try out an idea and undo it if it doesn't work, enlarge a portion of your drawing for detail work, and fill in background colors and textures with just a keystroke. And when you finish "painting" for the day, you don't have to clean your brushes!

Children can use many of the simpler drawing and clip art applications, but very young children might have more fun with coloring-book applications, in which the kids color pictures by using electronic crayons.

Educational software is for learning—and there are lots of ways to learn, aimed at lots of different age groups. There are interactive nursery rhymes, in which preschoolers try to keep Humpty Dumpty from falling off his wall; applications that teach teenagers how to dissect frogs by using electronic scissors in a simulated science lab; applications that coach business people on negotiating strategies; and lots more.

At one extreme on the creativity scale are the drill-and-practace applications. They present information (on spelling, math, music, history, geography, Spanish, French, SAT questions—you name it) and then test how well you learned it. Drill-and-practice applications for kids are often disguised as arcade games, in which the object is to answer a question before the meteor containing the question crashes into their spaceship, for example.

Figure 5-9
Computer as teacher

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Chapter 5: Application Programs