The Space Mall was my second favorite place. This is kind of a hodgepodge of information: hats, tubes (about catheters), books, art gallery, and body shop. The body shop has a game on body parts and a video about a check-up, both of which I enjoyed, and I had fun putting hats on the Space Buddy.
After I put on my own serious hat, I went to the outline to look for the adult-targeted information. Is there some real, in depth information for parents on Kidz? After a bit of searching, I found the parent sections in the Space Mall. Actually, just about all the serious, adult-level information is in the Space Mall, under “books.” I did like some of these areas, especially:
Know Your Medicines: This is a medicine database prepared by pediatric oncology experts and pharmacists. It’s pretty good. If a family owned the disc, the parents might prefer the CD ROM over printed (or Web site) versions of the same information. (Numerous versions of medicine databases are also readily available in books, the first of which comes to my mind being Childhood Leukemia by Nancy Keene, which I consider a necessity for parents of children with leukemia.)
Physician Data Query (PDQ): This is nice to have on the CD, and will be helpful for parents of newly diagnosed kids. However, PDQs are readily available on Internet sites using a quick web search.
Resource List with Internet links: I like this section, not so much for the sites it includes but for the “hot links”. I highly commend the authors of Kidz for sending users to a “hot” site where lists of urls can be constantly updated, both as addresses change and as new Web sites are published. What remains to be seen is how frequently they update the “hot links” on the Kidz Web site.
Frequently Asked Questions: Good FAQs as far as they go, but nothing earth shattering. Most of us find these out from our doctors. The FAQs are excellent, however, for parents of newly diagnosed kids.
The Kidz CD ROM is really quite good. I am amazed that anyone took the time and initiative to produce such an high-quality program targetted at such a (luckily) small population: young children with leukemia. I think that young children will actually like to explore the program, learning about their disease as they go. I do advise parents (or hospital staff) to sit down with their child (or patient) as they go through the program, both to supplement the information in Kidz and to answer questions as they come up.
It would be wonderful if all kids had access to this disc in the first days after diagnosis with leukemia. Probably the best place for Kidz is in pediatric oncology hospital libraries. Children later in treatment or even off-treatment would also benefit from the program.
Given the cost of Kidz, not every (or even very many) families of children with leukemia will be able to afford the disc for personal, home usage. (The family must already own a PC compatible Pentium computer: this fact alone crosses off a large percentage of the population.) This would be ideal, but it is probably unrealistic.
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