Meredith Silverman

Kerpoof has three different activities at different levels: make a picture, make a story, and make a movie. The first and second are easy and interesting enough for kids around 7-12 years old. The third activity, make a movie, is a lot harder. Some very interested 12-year-olds might be able to use it, but it could be used by any age up to adults.

The activity, overall, is fun and appealing. There are a couple of pitfalls that I ran into, that would certainly effect the experience for kids using the software. Most importantly, it’s easy to lose your work. When you hit done, or go to another screen, you lose your work. The software doesn’t warn you or give you a chance to change your mind.

The main appeal of the software – the fact that images on screen recede behind each other using perspective – makes it easy to immediately succeed but hard to further customize. You can’t pile objects on top of each other, for instance. This can be annoying if you want to put the kitty in the box or the vase on the table.

In addition to the activities you can do on screen, you can easily send your picture to a friend or print it out to color it.