If you have landed here after typing "is Kid Pix still around" into Google, the short answer is yes. Kid Pix is still made, still sold, and still used in classrooms. The current version is Kid Pix 5: The S.T.E.A.M. Edition, and it runs on Mac, Windows and iPad.
The longer answer is more interesting, because Kid Pix has been passed between five different publishers in thirty-odd years, which is why it can be hard to find and why so many people assume it disappeared.
Where Kid Pix came from
Kid Pix was written by Craig Hickman in 1988. He had been watching his three-year-old son Ben try to use MacPaint, and noticed that while Ben picked up the mouse quickly, he kept falling into menus and dialog boxes that made no sense to him. Hickman set out to build a drawing program a small child could not get lost in.
He gave the first version away. From 1989 it circulated as freeware on bulletin boards, passed between Macintosh users. Broderbund bought the rights and published version 1.0 commercially in March 1991, and Apple demonstrated it during the Macworld Expo keynote that January. It became one of the best-known pieces of educational software ever made.
Every version, in order
- 1989 — the original, released as freeware
- 1990 — Kid Pix Professional, adding colour, sound and the mixer tool
- 1991 — Kid Pix 1.0, published commercially by Broderbund
- 1995 — Kid Pix Studio, adding the Stampinator, Moopies and the slide show creator
- 1998 — Kid Pix Studio Deluxe
- 2000 — Kid Pix Deluxe 3, from Broderbund and Riverdeep
- 2004 — Kid Pix Deluxe 4, from The Learning Company and Riverdeep
- 2004 — Kid Pix Deluxe 3X, the first version built by Software MacKiev, for Mac OS X
- 2010 — Kid Pix Deluxe 3D for Mac, adding path animation, 3D characters and video narration
- 2011 — Kid Pix Deluxe 3D for Windows
- 2018 — Kid Pix 5: The S.T.E.A.M. Edition, the current version
Software MacKiev had been building Kid Pix since 2000 and bought the brand outright from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in October 2011. Craig Hickman, who had stepped away from the software in the late 1990s, returned as a consultant on later editions.
So why does everyone think it vanished?
Three reasons, mostly.
It stopped being on shop shelves. Kid Pix was a boxed CD-ROM you bought at a computer shop. Those shops closed, and educational software moved to direct download and school licensing. The product kept going; the place you used to find it did not.
The name kept changing. Deluxe 3, Deluxe 4, Deluxe 3X, Deluxe 3D, then 5. If you last used "Kid Pix Deluxe" in 2003 and searched for that exact name, you would reasonably conclude it had been discontinued.
Old copies stopped running. The versions most people remember were written for Mac OS 9 or early Windows. They will not install on a modern machine, which makes it feel as though the whole thing died.
Can you play the old versions online for free?
Old copies of the 1990s versions do circulate on abandonware and archive sites, and some run in a browser through an emulator. They are unsupported, they are not legal to use in a school, and they will not open or save files in any format a modern computer is useful with. Fine for five minutes of nostalgia. Not something to build a lesson on.
There is no official free online version of Kid Pix.
What Kid Pix 5 actually is
Kid Pix 5 is the same idea, brought forward. The drawing tools behave the way they always did — pick a silly brush, make a mess, undo it, start again. What is new is what happens after the drawing.
Students can turn a picture into a narrated slide show, a flipbook animation, or an interactive project where tapping a character makes it speak or fly off the screen. They can record a voiceover for a whole story, appear in their own video documentaries using the computer's camera, and make their own stamps out of anything they can draw or photograph.
It was the first version to run on iPad, and the first built for 64-bit machines — which is precisely why the older versions stopped working.
Where to get it in Australia
We supply Kid Pix 5 as a digital download for Mac and Windows, and we handle school licensing — 50-user network licences, upgrade pricing for schools already running an older edition, and quantities in between.
See Kid Pix 5 — STEAM Edition for Mac and Windows.
If you are a school and need a quote for a specific number of licences, add it to a quote with your requirements and we will price it.
One last thing
Ringo Starr is a Kid Pix user. He has made artwork in it and exhibited the results in galleries. Make of that what you will.