Every year I tell a new bunch of students not to take it personally if I ignore them in the corridors of the college. By way of explanation, I admit that I have a terrible memory for faces. However, next year I might not have to make this confession because Facemaker and Police Artist might be useful for improving my facial recognition.

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Facemaker comes from Spinnaker Software, publishers of the best-selling Snooper Troops cases (Windfall, December 1983). It allows a face to be built up by selecting a particular feature (nose, eyes, etc) and then choosing from the available examples.

Once you've designed a face, you can animate it in certain ways. For example, it can wink, frown, stick its tongue out or wiggle its ears in addition to smiling and crying.

Single letters are used to specify the action, and a "program" of actions can be written to produce a sequence of actions. All this is good fun, but there is also a game element which can be selected. This is a sort of Simon game using the face you've designed, with another action being added to the string each time you correctly remember it.

A count is kept of the number of items you remember, and your highest score is also displayed.

The animations are each accompanied by a particular sound, so Spinnaker say that the program not only improves visual but also auditory sequential memory.

Keyboard familiarity is also learned, and the specifying of a sequence of animations is seen as a "gentle introduction to programming". The appropriate age range is given as four to eight years.

Police Artist comes from Sir-Tech, renowned for Wizardry among other things. It consists of three separate games, all revolving around the identikit idea.

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In Police Lineup, the face of a culprit appears briefly on the left of the screen. Then, one by one, a series of suspects appears on the right of the screen. You must identify the culprit and reject innocent people.

There are four levels (bystander, eye witness, star witness and eagle-eye) and you can choose which level you start on. Success leads to higher levels, unless of course you start at the hardest.

In Police Artist, you press the space bar for the culprit to appear on the left of the screen. When you think you know the face, pressing space bar causes it to disappear. You must then construct the culprit's face by choosing the appropriate features from a pool.

The number of seconds you peek at the culprit is your score, and so you are aiming for the lowest score. You can peek again while you're trying to reconstruct the face, but it puts your score up.

Again there are four levels, with only two face parts per group on level 1 but 16 face parts per group on level 4.

Off Duty simply allows you to build faces for fun. You have access to the whole bank of face parts, so there are 1,048,576 possible combinations.

Each face in all three sections of Police Artist is given a name, and there are also various sounds used throughout. The appropriate age range is given as from seven years upwards.

Both of these packages proved extremely popular with the children who tried them. Police Artist is manageable by children younger than seven, and Facemaker proved popular with children older than eight.

One of the favourite games was "let's make a face like daddy/mummy/teacher" and the ability to make the face stick its tongue out was a real hit! Maybe if I get my students to stick their tongues out I might recognise them.