Indeed, the Isle of Tune, is every bit as much about city planning as much as it is about learning how to compose musical melodies.  The way it works is that you start by laying down roads. You can create something as simple as a few small streets, or you can create a complex system of roadways that span several city blocks. It’s entirely up to your child’s imagination. And then the next step is to create cars that will traverse these roads. You can create up to 3 cars in this game.

Now, here comes the interesting (and challenging) part:

The next step is to lay down trees, houses, lamp posts, trees, and shrubs alongside the road. But these are not just there to add scenery. Each of these roadside additions is a fully configurable and customizable musical instrument that is played every time one of the three cars drives by it. Each instrument is customizable in terms of volume, pitch and tone, type of tone, how many beats to play or skip of the tone.

And once you lay everything out, it’s time to animate your city by playing the “Go” button. Your cars will automatically start driving up and down the roads. (You can even define one-way intersections or roads to keep the cars driving in a specific pattern). As they pass by each roadside object you created, that particular tone will be played.

Beginners will get a kick out of being able to create music with Isle of Tune. More advanced players will be able to compose entire melodies. The site even comes with some sample designs that were created to play some popular and familiar songs. And you can always save your creations to come back and play later. Or you can share them with others.

From the website: “Once upon a time this was a holiday-ish site created by a rather big-ish ad agency to help raise money for UNICEF. Well, we more than hit our goal of $10 000 and wanted to say thanks by turning the site over to the people”.

A beautiful winter snowflake created at flurrious.com

Just like in real life, there is no undo or erase function in this drawing application! The resulting image can be printed on your printer, however.

To clear your music and start from scratch, just press the space bar.

Many people have published their best Tone Matrix generated tunes on Youtube. Just do a search for tonematrix on YouTube to find them!

Don’t forget to check out all the other free online kid’s activites on thie site. There are , for example, many creative building activities such as Build a Robot, Make a Face or Make a Snowman, as well as several connect-the-dots games.

Jacksonpollock.org was created in Adobe Flash by Milos Manetas.  It is also available for the iPhone.

Fun doodles at jacksonpollock.org.

Tux Paint is free, open source software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Tuxpaint is sponsored by the Tux For Kids project.

Paining a hen in Tuxpaint.

On the website qbesq.com, you will find a Flash arabesque drawing tool that works similar to a computerized spirograph. . Create a beautiful symmetric kaleidoscope-style image, or perhaps a vector based flower, and save it in SVG format or upload it to the Flicker Qbesq group.

Visit qbesq.com and let your kids play with the caleidoscope painter!

Drawing a kalieidoscope image on qbesq.com.

The members that color the most pages will be displayed on the site’s Top Members list, and the finished paintings can be saved to a personal gallery.

Fish coloring sheet at the thecolor.com website.