The educational mode is to provide a little amount of controls and still being able to create a good word cloud. Specially in using the application in class-rooms, where the creativity of children can be triggered, the interface of the application must be simple, fun, and easy to understand and easy to use.
Although the GUI still much follow the lay-out of the full version, the educational mode it's a great simplification that boils down to the basic controls which have a clear visible effect on the 'wordlet' (as the word cloud picture result is called in these chapters), and where its effects can easily be explained to youngsters.