I'm a kindergarten teacher in Beijing, and my students love to use the powder toy. So many of you have contributed in helping young children enjoy and learn important scientific facts.

I have an interactive white board in my class so that the children can draw using a a 3ft by 4 1/2ft powder toy screen.

It helps to have elements like fire and wood when learning the alphabet and then have the children burn the letters away instead of just erasing.

But the current version isn't very kid friendly. The buttons are too small for the children to use without accidentally pressing something else.

Since many of them are toddlers they don't have the motor skills not to accidentally draw past the black screen, and that causes the next window behind powder toy to pop up.

the best features are the plants since the children love to make them grow using water. Anyone have an idea for making flowers?

So I guess the main features that would really help young children enjoy powder toy as much as we do would be:

1. Larger kid friendly buttons
2. A way for powder toy to be the only application on the screen, and can only be exited by pressing a button on the keyboard (like esc for example.)
3. Maybe something visually appealing like a flower from the plants or something like that. (this one is more my request than the kids.)

thanks Simon. I tried the command line scale, but it was too large for my lap top or the white board, it cut the bottom portion off and couldn't reach the buttons. Do you know how to make it scale 1.5? I tried typing it in the command line, but it didn't work. I think 1.3 or 1.5 scale would work out.

Maybe for the children a simplified button menu would be best. Perhaps only give them five or six elements to use in the kiddie version. The more the children can do on there own the great the sense of accomplishment on their faces.

my five year olds have the motor skills to pick elements, but the sub-element's menus are too hard for them. When the cursor hovers over the sub-menu icons it automatically switches the elements menu to a new subset. I have a hard enough time not accidentally switching between menus, and its almost impossible for them not to.

Toddlers around 2 to 3 really can't pick any elements themselves, but enjoy painting with the colors. I give them a large telescoping pointer to draw with, which can be twice their body length. Toddlers have enough of a time holding a pencil, and my pointer is a little like painting with a broom stick.

They actually do get the hang of it, but they sometime swing the thing around when the get excited and end up selecting anything on windows explorer that's within reach. I usually have to jump up and reselect power toy. I have a computer game called "Reader Rabbit for preschool" and the program blacks out all the other programs while the game is on and the children can only select things on the screen. The reader rabbit game screen is actually the same size as powder toy's screen, but its automatically positioned into the middle of the monitor, and you have to press a exit icon to leave the game. That way it's impossible for the children to accidentally switch between programs.

Also, I think a large and easy to see "reset" button is a must. The current one is next to the "log in" button, and takes ten second to disengage before going back to the game. Imagine trying to turn the light switch on with a broom handle, and you can get an idea of how hard it is for the kids to press the button.

Thanks for the support guy and girls.

Unfortunately, the program extends way below the windows menu bar on my monitor. Tried changing the resolution, but was still too large to reach the bottom 1/3 of the screen.