Short of ideas for a kids' outing? You can use the net to find out what's on in your local area, says Jenny Benjamin
Somewhere in the dusty recesses of my home office is a Kids' Outings folder containing a collection of leaflets detailing the various attractions and facilities of my local area. 'How organised!' I hear you say. Not a bit of it. For a start, I can never find the folder. If it does turn up, and I can find the brochure I want among all the dog-eared rubbish, the information is usually out-of-date.
Sorting out my filing would perhaps put an end to this events-planning misery. But another, quicker, solution for me and for nurseries planning some summer days out is to go to the World Wide Web, where sites dedicated to events, activities and facilities for children are on the increase.
Geographical coverage is still patchy. Some areas have nothing, and some have sites that are still under construction. All the existing sites are worth a visit. They may not yet have up-to-date events information but they usually have lists of all the local venues with descriptions and telephone numbers so that you can find out what's going on there at the moment.
The most ambitious player is www.planit4kids.com.The company's home page links into local sites, each with their own web address, for example, www.london4kids.com.At the moment, the service covers seven cities - Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, London and Manchester. The sites provide information on sports, party planning, toddler activities, classes and workshops, special needs facilities and restaurants in addition to the usual stuff on theatres, cinemas, museums and galleries. There are also features and reviews of books, videos and software. Some local sites are better than others on the current events diary.
One of the best 'what's on' sites is www.kidsdirect-cambridge.co.uk.It was set up single-handedly by Debbie Banaszkiewicz, editor of the (printed) Cambridge Kidsdirect listings magazine.
Set up in December last year, it has received 1,500 hits since January - not bad for a new, locally-based site. The magazine appears three times a year and Debbie was receiving lots of phone calls from people too impatient to wait for the next publication. A regularly updated website seemed to be the answer and, as the parent Kidsdirect company wasn't interested in setting one up, Debbie decided to go it alone. Funding has come mainly from adverts in the magazine and partly from people advertising on the website. She had no experience of web design, but got launched after just one evening spent with a teach-yourself Microsoft Front Page 2000 CD Rom. Debbie has three children and says that the site is her fourth baby - she gets satisfaction from looking after it, but finds it very time consuming, especially late at night.
Software reviews
Vintage mouse What does a big (the biggest?) entertainment corporation do when it wants to suggest quality and a commitment to learning, without sacrificing kid-appeal? Well, in Disney's case, it seems to be to go back to its own beginnings, to Mickey and Minnie, 1930s diners and cheeky-looking cars.
This heritage treatment is aparent in Pre-school Adventures with Mickey, and Get Ready for School with Mickey (PC/Mac, CD Rom, Disney Interactive, 19.99 each), the former for children aged two to four, and the latter for four- to six-year-olds. Both aim to promote learning through play, adjusting automatically to the player's performance by increasing or decreasing the difficulty of the activities.
Pre-school's games rely on number, letter and shape recognition and help learning about size, colours and sequencing. Few two-year-olds could manage these exercises, and, at the upper levels, the brightest four-year-old would be struggling. But there are also open-ended activities: for example, a car dashboard where you can operate the wipers, turn the radio up, and so on.
The open-ended activities have a slightly off-beat quality that intensifies in the second CD, Get Ready for School. The whackiest is Bellboy Shuffle, which encourages lateral thinking.
There is much to recommend here - appealing graphics, good sound and picture quality, ease of use and a few really original ideas. But the drawbacks are an overemphasis on number and letter for the younger ones, limited encouragement for creativity, and the relentlessness of the goal-oriented games. Yes, they adjust smoothly to performance, but they never give a sense of completion - no end of game, no score, no final congratulation.
The up-beat music and voice urge you to keep going; the game is compulsive - could we be looking at yet another educational programme whose real function is keeping the kids quiet for as long as possible? Perish the thought.