Intelligent designs: Uncle Sam reaches out to kids on the web.

• Author: Clarke, Conor
• Position: TEN MILES SQUARE - Website overview

In late March, the Federal Reserve took an educational gamble: it created a website for kids. But perhaps more significant than the site itself--which offers a brief tour of economic policy guided by a cartoon bald eagle--was the fact that a major paper wound up noticing it. In an adventurous foray into the world of government kids' pages, The Washington Post praised the central bank's "colorful" creation.

Unfortunately, by finding news in a single, sagging tree, the Post managed to miss a flourishing forest. For years, the government has run thousands of kids' pages--almost every agency has one--most of which are far better than the Fed's. (And, really, the Fed site is pretty lame: there are no games or prizes, and the eagle is crudely animated). These sites can be traced back to a 1997 memorandum in which Bill Clinton directed agency heads to "enrich the Internet as a tool for teaching and learning" and suggested kids' pages as a possible improvement. The memo was, as one agency web-honcho puts it, "a call to action."

But ordering up a website is easy. Making one that'll have kids hooked is hard. Sure, NASA's website draws a crowd, but that's a special case: space is inherently cool. Very little else in government is. What government can offer tends to be at best boring (press releases on animal ID systems, Treasury forecasts) and at worst terrifying (crime, natural disasters, war). How, then, do you dress all this up in a kid-friendly costume? To find out, we talked to dozens of government web-designers--"tunnel people," as one insider calls them--and spent enough hours surfing children's pages to earn an honorary place on the national sex-offenders registry.

The main thing we learned is that any self-respecting site for kids must feature a cartoon mascot, preferably one from the animal kingdom. The CIA's page, for instance, employs a blue bear named Ginger, a mascot-cumtour guide at Langley. ("Hi! My name is Ginger. That's short for Virginia, where my home is ... I love walnuts, but I never thought you could hide a secret message in the empty shell." And so forth). But manmade objects can also fit the bill. Take the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) website, which created Stanley Stat, an animated graph who, along with his ambiguous love interest, PieChart Pam, exhorts kids to learn more about, well, agricultural statistics. ("Do you know your Agricultural Statistics History?" inquires Stanley, staying admirably...