Need a last-minute Christmas gift for that computerphile on your list? Read on.
We were sure that creativity couldn't be taught. Then we found Edmark's new Thinkin' Things. As you play with its bevy of toys, you also study music, art, science and language - all without needing to know how to read.The title screen is your entrance gate to six activities. Each one provides many different kinds of play. Some seem very simple. For instance, one game has you copy a pattern of notes played on different instruments. It's easy when you can watch the notes being played. But then you get to try it with the lights out. Not so easy any more.
One game is particularly mesmerizing. You get to build kinetic patterns like those found in the best screen savers. Besides choosing shapes and planning their three-dimensional movements, you get to add an electronic musical background.
A game of logic helps youngsters learn the difference between AND, OR and NOT. That's truly a computer-age skill. A voice-over reads those three little words in case your tike can't. The same voice explains what to do in every game.
If you buy the package, read the manual. It shows how to get to a hidden "adult section" so you can vary the games' difficulty. From there, you can also customize screens for children with special needs.
Though Edmark (1-206-556-8484) says the program's for ages 4 to 8, we suspect younger and much older siblings will fight to play.
Mac and IBM-compatible versions both list at $60, with school editions priced at $70. Warning: If you have a Sound Blaster whose interrupt (IRQ) is at an unusual setting, you need to phone tech support for a patch so your youngsters can hear the sounds clearly.
Reader Rabbit's Ready for Letters is a nice little set of five games for 3-to-5-olds. Besides being fun to play, they teach what educators like to call "reading readiness."
Two games match shapes and letters. Another associates words with their pictures and (if you have a good sound card) with their sounds. In a fourth, a voice reads an onscreen sentence containing a preposition like IN, UNDER or ON. Youngsters guess what the word means.
In a fifth game, children can simply change onscreen drawings at will. All it seems to teach is that curiosity pays, but that's worth learning, too.
Ready for Letters is a sequel to excellent old Reader Rabbit 1 and 2, which use carefully created games to teach the alphabet, letter sounds and simple words. All list at $60 each for Macs and MS-DOS.
The IBMcompatible versions are playable from a floppy disk. (Learning Co. (1-800-852-2255) discontinued its Apple versions of the older games.)
Undersea Adventure is the sixth program in Knowledge Adventure's "multimedia" educational entertainment series. Adapted from The Random House Atlas of the Oceans, its wide range of activities pack in a lot of learning.
There are two matching games and two maze games. There's a "laboratory" where you can dissect undersea specimens and learn their biology. One game explores the oceans and most things in them. There's just enough data about each picture to whet a curious child's appetite.
Throughout, there are good sound and speech effects and photo-quality images - including some five-second "movies" of seagoers at play. Not surprisingly, all this takes up 10M of disk space.
Knowledge Adventure (1-800-542-4240) recommends Undersea Adventure for ages 3 to 103. We'd buy it mostly for the 7-to-11 range. It lists at $30 for IBM-compatibles and $40 for a CD-ROM version.
Of the rest of the same series, we liked $30 (BOLD) Space Adventure a little and $20 Dinosaur Adventure a lot.
In 1985, there was Word Attack. (We loved it.) In 1989, there was Word Attack Plus. (We loved it more.) Now there's Word Attack 3. It uses games to teach the spelling, meaning and pronunciation (if you have a good sound board) of 3,200 words (up from 700) from fourth grade to adult level. The graphics are superb.
Instead of moving through "lessons," learners play games - five kinds, each with many levels of difficulty. Most games make you match words with definitions. One's like a crossword puzzle, anther is a tile game, and two are arcadetype activities. In most games, the word you're learning is read aloud whenever you get its meaning right.
The only game missing is old Word Attack, which used to flash definitions onscreen. As each meaning came up, the learner had to "shoot" the word it applied to. You had to be fast - and right - to score.
If you want to study before you play, you can bring up a word list. They're grouped into categories like science, engineering, music, foreign-language and SAT preparation. An easy-to-use editor lets you add custom lists. The software fits them into the games.