Comment 11 for bug 170488

The OLPC developers [http://laptop.org/] would be interested
in this idea but Inkscape is too heavy for their requirements.
You should keep an eye out for efforts to port inkscape to
GPE/Maemo or other lightweight platforms as was discussed on
the devel list last month (August).

http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Roadmap#Milestone_16_-_Cairoification_-_Inkscape_0.50
The Roadmap includes "Create a Cairo-based SVG Canvas
library" which is likely to help any other applications
which want to reuse the inkscape canvas such as other
applications like your suggested childrens version.