Children's learning and home learning

An immense number of titles, probably running into the thousands, were developed and released from the mid-1990’s onwards, aimed primarily at the home education of younger children. Later iterations of these titles often began to link educational content to school curricula (such as England’s National Curriculum). The design of educational software programmes for home use has been influenced strongly by computer gaming concepts – in other words, they are designed to be fun as well as educational. However as far as possible a distinction should be drawn between proper learning titles (such as these) and software where the gaming outweighs the educational value (described later).

The following are examples of children’s learning software which have a structured pedagogical approach, usually orientated towards literacy and numeracy skills.

Disney Interactive learning titles based on characters such as Winnie-the- Pooh Aladdin.The Jungle Book and Mickey Mouse
GCompris, contains numerous activities, from computer discovery

to science Knowledge Adventure’s JumpStart and Blaster Learning System series
The Learning Company’s Reader Rabbit, The ClueFinders and Zoombinis series