We've discovered that a great many wonderful-sounding titles actually offer little more than mindless point-and-click activities. They call themselves interactive. But in reality, they promote passive viewing.

The child's experience with them is often not much more demanding that surfing TV channels with the remote control. Lots of reference products fall prey to this problem. So do products that co-opt footage from movies, TV shows or comic books. So does a lot of storybook software.

To help your child avoid brainless pointing-and-clicking, here are some questions you can ask about a program's learning experience:

• Does it invite active participation, exploration and discovery?
  
• Does it inspire kids to put their new-found knowledge to work?

Multimedia, we think, is a real step forward since it offers kids multiple ways to learn: through words, music and sound, animation, video.

But too many titles fall prey to the multimedia-for-multimedia's-sake syndrome. Confronted with overabundant special effects, kids often lose track of what they're doing and why.

So it's important to step back from the technology and ask yourself:

• Does it achieve the best possible balance of multimedia elements?
• Does its use of multimedia really enhance the learning experience?

We like to see kids come back to good software the way they come back to a good book. (And we like to see parents get their money's worth, too.) So we tested every title for replay value. We asked ourselves and our test families:

• Is this a program kids come back to again and again?
• Or do they lose interest once the novelty wears off?

We found that the more a program asks of a child, the more a child gets out of it. Many of the best programs are "tools" that let kids create something new and unique every time they play. Like art or story writing programs. For older kids, the challenge of a mystery or a quest to solve keeps them coming back - far more than a click-and-browse-type activity does.

Here's the acid test for evaluating kids' software. It's the Museum's most distinctive question: does the software use technology to add a new dimension to the learning experience ... something kids couldn't get in any other way?

The Sim series from Maxis is a good example. Kids 10 and up are ready for SimCity or the newer SimTower, especially if you help them get started. Younger kids can start with SimTown. These computer models of real-life situations let kids step into different roles, experiment with decision-making and experience the consequences of their choices. And these are experiences that kids can only have with the computer.