Scratch

Sorry to all for this off-topic post.

I'm looking for educational softwares that are entertaining for children, ages 4 to 14 (or so). The entertainment value is to attract the children enough to continue their exploration, thus learning, with computers.

First, some background...

I'm from Penang, Malaysia. In my spare time, I assist a Catholic charitable organization in an after-school program for children from slum areas.

These children grow up in an environment filled with pain, suffering, fear, anger, self-pity and abuses. Crimes are everywhere, all types of crime - you name it, they got it - murder, family abuses, incest, *, drugs, beatings, gansterism, suicide, whatever... While they are growing up, all they are exposed to is violence, agony, and despair.

And the Catholic charitable organization is hoping that they can turn this around - not only they offer after-school help to the children who are enrolled in their programs, they try their best to assist in every way - using love, care, and sometimes they even offer financial aids.

The computer program is one of their latest project - that's what I'm involved in. What we do is we collect junked computers from people who throw them away, take them apart, examine and testing each and every parts, and try to rebuild a usable computer system using working parts.

So far we have managed to rebuild some machines. Since they are old computers (original pentium, pentium 2 and pentium 3) we run win98 on them. I equip the systems with at least 64MB of RAM (some with 128MB, if I can find working mem modules), and at least a 5GB hard disk.

So far none of the computer can play music - I've yet to find working drivers for the old soundcards that we got.

Screen - We use what we get - old CRT from 13" to 17".

With the computers ready, it's time to look for worthy softwares. Scratch is one that I've found (kudos to the Scratch people), and I wonder if there are any other worthwhile softwares that you can recommend ?

There are 3 basic requirements of the software -

A. They must be low cost - preferably no cost, because we don't have that much money to start with.

B. They must run under minimal RAM / CPU / HD condition - preferably Win98, 64MB RAM, and not taking too much HD space.

C. They must educate while entertain. At least entertaining enough for the kids to forget that they are learning, and to compete with the violence, *, and all other types of "interesting stuffs" out there.

If you know of such software, please share with me your suggestion. You can post them here (if it's okay with the moderators here, merci), or you can email me at pg@catholic.org

Thank you and Happy New Year to all !