plav@cup.portal.com (Rick M Plavnicky) (11/01/89)
This is the second time I'm trying to post this; last time I got some
too-fast-to-read error message. My apologies if this appears more than
once.
Those of you that have been waiting to hear from me WRT 'kidsware' on
the Amiga, the wait is over. Thanks for being patient.
I originally posted requesting info on this back in the beginning of
August, and since then many people have written with their suggestions
and opinions. This article reprints parts of what I've collected, and
hopefully it'll help. Those that contributed (and numerous others),
thanks, and I hope you don't mind me passing your opinions to the world!
This is a funny topic. If my mailbox is any indication, there are many
net.readers interested. Yet, there doesn't seem to be much active
discussion. Some months ago someone suggested starting a mailing list
(and even offerred to coordinate!) but nothing ever surfaced (to my
knowledge).
As for me, well, my wife and I are childless but we have 4 year old
niece who visits fairly frequently. Whenever she does, she loves to
spend time on the Amiga. While she likes DeluxePaint (and asks for it
by name when visiting other computer-equipped households, much to their
surprise!) she hasn't really shown an interest in other software.
Well, she *does* like looking at various animations/demos, but who
doesn't? (grin)
I haven't bought any software specifically geared towards her age
group. The dealers around here all seem to charge a premium price for
such stuff, and never offer deals or discounts like they do for other
packages. For example, I'll see 'AREXX' on the shelf for as low as $25
but 'Discovery' for an unwavering $50. Is that true all over? That
seems a bit stiff, given that it'd be sort of seldom used, at best, and
she might not even like it.
--- quoted material follows ---
jmpiazza@cs.Buffalo.EDU (Joseph M. Piazza):
"How about Comic Setter? She can use the art work she makes on DPaint
(though currently only upto 16 colors) as well as using Comic Setter
itself (an object oriented environment) and deliver a finished
product."
rap@peck.ardent.com (Rob Peck):
"I saw MYPAINT being demo-ed on a couple of occasions. It is a very
simplistic paint program but as I recall also has some audio cues built
into it. I dont know who the publisher is, but it really seems pretty
neat. If I was a kid, I'd have liked it."
nschultz@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (Ned W. Schultz):
"[My son] was just under three years old when we got [MyPaint]. He
loves the program and has been able to master all aspects of it. It
has certainly expanded his creative interests and his enjoyment of the
computer. I also think that his fine motor skills in non-computer
drawing, painting, etc. have improved quyite a bit from using the
mouse. In fact, the Fill option on MyPaint seems to have transferred
over to his other art work."
Josh Rovero <PROVERO@WSMR-SIMTEL20.ARMY.MIL>:
"Try MyPaint, a paint program more for the kiddy set. It has 28 canned
images, and simplified pallet/options gadgets. My 3 & 5 year olds
really like it."
"[...] try the MicroIllusions Discovery program. It can be configured
with any number of add-on disks for different subjects. The math and
spelling can be level-selected to match your niece's abilities. It is
ostensibly a "find the 12 power crystals" game, but the player has to
answer the educational questions to get hrough all the automatic doors."
uunet!sugar.hackercorp.com!ssd (Scott Denham):
"I've gotten excellent service from Talking Coloring Book (JMH
software). My older daughter was about 5 when we bought it, and loved
it up until about 7 (when she discovered Hack!). My 4 year old has now
taken it up and is equally enthralled. Match-It from The Other Guys is
also pretty popular around here, as are the Robot Readers from Hilton
Android. We also have First Shapes from First Byte, and though it's
similar to Match-It in concept, and much "slicker" in it's
implementation, the response is SO slow that they loose interest pretty
quickly. Match-It, on the other hand, looks much cruder and uses the
Amiga's standard speech, but they seem to like it better."
sun!mcrware!tim (Tim Harris):
"[...] get Designasaurus by Britannica, it does everything the Dino
Discovery program does and more and my kids love it. With
Designasaurus you can design your own dinosaur out of various bones,
walk a dinosaur around in a pre-historic land and print out dinosaur
pictures to color. If you have Deluxe Paint you can load up the dino
pictures and color them in there too, my 7 year old does this quite a
bit. [...] Dino Discovery is mostly just a dinosaur coloring book from
what I saw of it. First Byte does make some decent stuff though, I
have Speller Bee and Math-Talk Fractions from them for my kids."
" My 7 year old and some of her younger friends like a few
simpler games too, Aunt Artic Adventure is a good one for young kids.
Any paint program seems to keep kids occupied for hours."
claris!eric%pyramid.pyramid.com (Eric Bergan):
" My daughter (4 1/2) really likes Dinosaur Discovery kit. Some
of the earlier First Byte (First Words, First Shapes) were also ok, but
had some bugs."
UH2@PSUVM.BITNET (Lee Sailer):
"I fooled with Designasaurus for a half hour or so. It seems fairly
well done. You can assemble a dino from spare parts and print it out."
"The 'game' involves leading a dino through 5 eras, eating appropriate
food, avoiding being eaten, and trying not to starve. [...] Their
'eras' are more or less populated with appropriate plants and terrain,
and the educational part is that the kids learn what plants and terrain
go together, I guess."
"My experience with kids playing with my Amiga (I have two, 5 and 8,
and they have lots of friends) is that as an adult I always over
estimate their skill. Designasaurus seemed really dumb *to me*. But I
bet that little kids would like it."
"My kids have two Unicorn products, Kinderware and Math Wizard.
They seem to like both of them pretty much."
{allegra,att}!m21ux!ccb (Chip Brewster):
"Micro-Illusions makes an excellent program called 'Discovery' that
makes learning real fun. You explore around a spaceship looking for
crystals and avoiding aliens. To get around you must solve problems in
math or spelling and you select the level of difficulty. They've done
a good job in the way the problems are solved. It might be more
appropriate for older children though. [...] 'The Talking Coloring
Book' (JMH Software) and 'Designasaurus' (Britannica Software) sound
real good and I plan to get them."
"I have a First Byte program called 'First Letters and Words'. I'm not
too impressed with it and neither are the kids. Occaisionally it will
summon 'The Guru', but it has a dinosaur coloring surprise that gets
used quite a bit."
apple!MCNC.ORG!ge-dab!morrison:
"I have two daughters (4 and 3) [and] have purchased four programs
specifically for them: Talking Coloring Book, First Shapes, First
Letters, [and] Con-Sound-Tration."
"Their favorite is probably Con-Sound-Tration followed by the other
three, but they play all four quite a bit. Con-Sound-Tration is a
really impressive program. The basic idea is that two large squares
each containing 4, 9, 16, or 25 smaller squares are presented to the
child (or Adult when I play it which I often do). The object is to
select a square on the left side which will present a picture of an
object, animal, letter, or number and select a square on the right side
that has the appropriate sound."
"Talking Coloring Book has also been a popular game for them. It
presents a line drawing of some sort (eg. clown, boat, plane,
user-defined) and a palette of crayons. The child selects a crayon and
clicks the line drawing. The program fills that area of the line
drawing with the selected color. Amy tells the child the name of the
color of the crayon when it is selected."
"First Shapes and First Letters are both games from First Byte. Their
quality is excellent and the games are quite varied. They are much
more educationally oriented that the other two, but still very
entertaining. [...] It seems that one of these has a mode similar to
the coloring book which colors dinosaurs and then speaks the name of
the dinosaur. I wouldn't be surprised to find that the Dinosaur
Discovery Kit you mentioned is simply a renamed version of one of
these. I believe I only paid about $25 for any of these through mail
order."
apple!ames!mailrus!novavax!suther (Scot M. Sutherland):
"My 2 year old daughter loves to play with 'First Shapes' also by First
Byte. I have found most of First Byte's stuff to be good. My five year
old likes Donald Duck's playground, even though it doesn't take full
use of Amiga's graphics and sound."
jea@merlin.cvs.rochester.edu (Joanne Albano):
"I have two preschoolers (ages 2 and 3) that appear to be getting quite
a bit of entertainment and learning out of ABZoo. This program has 3
levels. My boys are currently at the beginners level which requires
that they depress a letter key when they are presented with a display
of the querty keyboard. Suppose the 3 year old picks "A" then the amiga
says 'A' and puts up a picture of an alligator appears and the amiga
says 'alligator'."
"The 3 year old knows the key board and the 2 year old that is at the
stage of learning new words loves to say the letter names and the
animal names. The 3 year old claps when the 2 year old says the words
correctly and they talk to each other about whether the animal is in
water or such."
"They will often ask to play 'ZOOOOO'. We have had this program now for
close to a year and it has continued to interest them through several
developmental stages."
"On the other hand I would avoid the BYTE BY BYTE Programs. They are not
good neighbors with other programs you might want to run and we end up
having to reboot everytime we use those. The ideas in the BYTE BY BYTE
programs seem appealing to us adults but they just havent held my kids
attention for so long. They may be aimed at older kids that have
learned to use the mouse effectively perhaps. But then I would think
that a child that knows how to use a mouse effectively would already be
bored with the concepts of square vs circle or small vs bigger or
coloring a dinosaur tail red and his head yellow."
Mike Smithwick <mike@ames.arc.nasa.gov>:
"One package I don't recall seeing listed is one I wrote called
'Galileo' [now 'Distant Suns', I think]. It was rated as 'Best
Educational Software' by Amazing Computing, and was listed in
AmigaWorld in their best-educational roundup. It is not for real
tiny-tots just learning to puch keys, but it should be usable for
anyone 7 years and up."
"Galileo is an astronomy package to aid in constellation
identification, show where the planets are on any date and the phase of
the moon. Click on any object, and an infomation panel comes up. Click
on galaxy, and a picture comes up."
Finally, here's some good advice no matter what software you decide
to mix with kids...
Ken Steele <kms@uncecs.edu>:
"The trick is to keep a special kids-only disk box that is backed up.
That way you won't go crazy trying to protect the disks. I seem like
the jolly uncle when a nephew comes out with a scrogged disk and I can
laugh it off."
--- end of quoted material ---
Rick Plavnicky
{...}!sun!cup.portal.com!plav
"I've got a bunch of bananas, and a bottle of bleach..."