Assuming, that is, they spend enough time playing with fun, but educational, kids stuff. Geared toward the entire range of grade school-age children, these titles provide oodles of fun while sneaking in learning o’ plenty.

Enter the Explorer and the Blue Puppy

Children’s TV shows have changed for the better over the years, and MacSoft offers a pair of games starring characters your kids probably know well: a diminutive adventurer named Dora and an inquisitive puppy known as Blue. Dora the Explorer: Animal Adventures features the first computer game appearance of Dora’s cousin, Diego, whose family runs an animal rescue center. Kids get to engage in activities ranging from reuniting lost baby animals with their mothers to water skiing down a river to rescue a trapped creature. Three difficulty levels keep the action on par with children’s abilities as they get older.

Dora the Explorer: Animal Adventures. Reunite the baby animals with their mothers in this memory game.

Animal Adventures also exposes children to simple Spanish words, including numbers introduced during counting exercises. Beloved character Map helps them navigate to new locations while Dora’s anthropomorphic friend Backpack keeps track of the stars they collect during the activities. When players feel like taking a break, they can access an in-game field journal to enjoy clips from their favorite Dora shows or create and print their own wilderness scenes.

Blue’s Clues: Blue Takes You to School. Miss Marigold and Magenta welcome your child to the next activity.

In Blue’s Clues: Blue Takes You to School, TV show host Joe guides children through a wide variety of activities in Miss Marigold’s class. The game acclimates them to the basics of going to school, from setting up a cubby to creating art projects to playing music. They even get to help take care of the classroom’s pet rabbit. Like Animal Adventures, Blue Takes You to School offers three difficulty levels so that the game grows with the student.

Many older children use the computer to write papers for school, which makes SpongeBob SquarePants Typing perfect for them. The boxy underwater sponge and his friends guide kids age seven and older through 17 lessons, each with five levels of difficulty. Game mode applies structure to the lessons while Freestyle mode encourages open-ended practice. Children even pick up facts about undersea life while they play, which could come in handy for their next projects.

Silly Alphabet

While his perennially popular work originated on the printed page, Dr. Seuss’ eccentric characters still make great learning partners, as Software MacKiev’s Dr. Seuss’ ABC proves. This updated version includes a KidVideo Player loaded with 14 music videos that feature Dr. Seuss’ creations, as well as an iTunes Music Installer that automatically puts all 14 songs in a playlist and imports it into iTunes. The software disc also doubles as a music CD that you can pop into any CD player.

Dr. Seuss ABC. The KidVideo takes your child straight to the fun.

Kids can access all the fun through two modes of play: Read to Me, which brings to life Dr. Seuss’ classic ABC book with animations, sound effects and songs; and Let Me Play, an interactive mode that encourages children to connect pictures and sounds with letters and words; they can even search for over 400 hidden surprises. This title is aimed at little gamers between the ages of three and six and promises to teach them more than 600 new words.

Software MacKiev also publishes Kid Pix Deluxe 3X, an art program that allows kids to make their own unique art and animations. They can export their work into iMovie and add it to a digital video, import iTunes tracks that add aural ambience to their masterpieces and browse iPhoto libraries for snapshots they want to dress up with some homemade art. This new version of Kid Pix even offers more drawing space to accommodate today’s larger computer displays.

I Spy with My Little Eye…

Dr. Seuss isn’t the only well-known name in the children’s book world. Many kids love Jean Marzollo and Walter Wick’s I SPY series of puzzle volumes, and Scholastic has obliged them with I SPY Fantasy and I SPY Spooky Mansion. Both games promise to help children build their problem solving, rhyming, logic and reasoning, reading, vocabulary, listening and other skills.

I SPY Fantasy. Explore strange new worlds.

I SPY Fantasy features three unique environments beneath the sea, on an alien world and in a castle. Players search for treasures lost in the ocean depths, command a mission on the extra-solar planet and storm the fortress in a quest to slay a dragon and rescue the princess. The three environments include more than 30 locations, with 54 riddles spread among them.

I SPY Spooky Mansion. Mirror, mirror on the wall, how do we get out of here?

In I SPY Spooky Mansion, players are locked inside a dark house and must figure out one of three different ways out. Eleven rooms, plus a hidden one, offer 39 brain-teasing riddles that provide the clues needed to decode a secret message, fix the ghost machine and make shrinking soup. Found objects can be combined to create seven ghost characters; perhaps the skeleton host can lend a hand, if only there was a way to make him more friendly.

Barbie and Imaginext

Of course, not all popular characters began their existences in books or on TV. Barbie, who has been around since 1959, is ready to make all little ones’ dreams come true in Vivendi’s Barbie as the Princess and the Pauper, Barbie Mermaid Adventure and Barbie of Swan Lake: The Enchanted Forest. Loosely based on classic stories, all three games offer creative activities, educational puzzles and more.

Swan Lake: The Enchanted Forest. The ever-versatile Barbie as the Swan Queen Odette.

The Princess and the Pauper is a gender-reversed version of the classic Mark Twain novel. Barbie plays both Princess Anneliese and Erika, who travel the kingdom to prove that Erika is ready to be crowned queen. Players solve puzzles and create items required to complete tasks found in the Book of Royalty. When they’re done, they decorate the castle for the coronation ceremony.

Barbie Mermaid Adventure. Travel deep beneath the sea during this story.