Click & Create with Mia

$19.95, Win, Mac OS (CD-ROM)

Teaches: creativity, art

CTR Review

This pleasant creativity program is fun to play with, but could be easier to use. It stars Mia the mouse and her friends, with backgrounds and characters taken from the Mia series of adventure programs. There are five open-ended art areas, each introduced by Mia and offering an optional tutorial. In the Paint Section, kids can freely paint or fill in line drawings taking from the Mia programs. The Draw Section offers step by step instructions on how to draw simple animals, robots, vehicles and more. In the Shapes Section, kids experiment with shapes and colors, and in the Multimedia Section, children combine backgrounds, dancing characters and music selections to create animated scenes. Finally, the Projects section offers a layout and design studio with templates for making crafts, cards, banners and so on. On the positive side, the artwork is terrific, and there's plenty to do. Testers loved the easy to use drawing tutorials and animated scene maker. Weaknesses include non-intuitive icons (what do you think an exclamation point button does?) making the program tricky to use, even with the built-in help available. Manipulating text in the Projects Section is also difficult. The program only offers a sign-in by album option, allowing only eight children to save their work at a time. This, of course, makes the program impractical for classroom use.