children's software review

 

Review Sections: Product Overview  Technically Speaking  Skills Covered  Educational Value  Entertainment Value  Design  Replayability  Dollar Value    

Product Overview
Mickey Mouse has lost six of the Sorcerer's magical items, leading him on a magical quest to reclaim the swept-away belongings. This adventure takes him along three paths — to the mountains, town, and forest — where six skill-building phonics challenges await players.

Children are treated to some snazzy graphics, fun feedback from favorite Disney characters, and entertaining cartoon sequences along the way. However, the meat of the program is educational indeed. Each of the six activities feature four different levels — and varieties — of game-play. Disney has cleverly offered a four-star system that allows kids to choose their own challenge in the program's activities. On level one, children work with initial consonant sounds and basic rhyming. Level two focuses on letter blends, and levels three and four contain more advanced practice with words and sentences, as well as rhymes. We found the automatic leveling system worked well, smoothly adjusting the difficulty levels according to a child's performance.

In this adventure, one of the learning challenges that children face requires paying attention to the words and pictures on baby dragons' t-shirts in order to sort them and return them to their mothers. Players will need to arrange the babies according to rules. On level one, for example, children look for pictures of items that start with specific letter sounds. Rules on level three may be "words that rhyme with deer," and on level four may be "things that fly" or "things that they'd do at the park."

One activity set at the highest difficulty level requires children to listen intently as sentences are read aloud in order to identify a mispronounced word. One sentence had someone "falling on his head" where "head" was pronounced "heed." Kids giggled as they reinforced their knowledge of irregular word spellings. Children always enjoy correcting errors, but best of all, this activity is a clever way of encouraging kids to analyze why a word could have been mispronounced in the first place.

Aside from the gorgeous graphics, what is most impressive about the program is its range in difficulty levels. The levels accommodate the abilities of a number of children — from those who are tackling beginning letter sounds all the way to kids who need practice spelling and reading irregular words. Thus, a five year old can comfortably work through the adventure, and an eight-year-old sibling will find his/her own challenges as well.

Voice-recognition technology is incorporated into the game and can be used occasionally in the adventure. For example, in one activity, kids select rhyming words by speaking the words they see on the screen into the microphone in lieu of clicking them with the mouse. Of course, this technology can be a little tricky and, at times, downright frustrating. Happily, this software program can be fully enjoyed with this feature turned off.

Our testers on the higher end of the suggested age group were anxious to collect all the magical items in one sitting, and thus found the activities lengthy and often tedious. A five-year-old tester, however, was happy playing the activities that appealed to her most. Absent was a sense of urgency to pull off the larger goal of the game.

Technically Speaking
Minimum system requirements are Windows 95/98/Me, Pentium 166 MHz (233 MHz for voice recognition feature), 32 MB RAM (64 MB for voice recognition), 8X CD-ROM, 16-bit DirectX-compatible sound card, 800x600 16-bit color DirectX-compatible video card, and 80 MB hard drive space. Mac users require a G3 processor 233 MHz, System 8.1, 8.6, 9.1 or higher, 32 MB RAM (64 MB for voice recognition), 8X CD-ROM, and 100 MB hard drive space.

Skills Covered
Players exercise deductive reasoning skills along with specific practice with consonant blends, homographs, irregular spelling, reading comprehension, identification of pronunciation errors, homonyms, spelling, sorting, word structure, sight words, beginning sounds, and rhymes.

Educational Value
While children may not become phonics "wizards" after working through these activities, they will have brushed up on a number of skills. The educational content is particularly strong on the higher levels that focus on homographs and irregularly spelled words. The activities require children to pay special attention to these concepts.

Entertainment Value
Astounding graphics and solid educational content don't totally make up for the sometimes tedious and lengthy activities. There is little disguising the fact that children are "working" as they play the program. However, the desire to restore order may be enough to motivate many children to persevere.

Design
Though the interface is fairly intuitive, there is quite a bit of chatter that can't seem to be bypassed during the activities. We wished we could have clicked through some of the more repetitive comments. In addition, there is some awkwardness when dragging and dropping, making the title best for computer-savvy kids. Newbies may get frustrated with the program's occasional need for precision and accuracy with the mouse.

Replayability
Children need to complete lengthy sets of exercises in order to earn each of the six magical items — a feature that is at once a strength and a weakness. The good news is that the program is packed with multi-level learning content. The bad news is that not all kids will see it through to the end of the game.

Dollar Value
This program carries a suggested retail price of $29.99 US.

 

A quest for magical items sets up phonics challenges for children in this graphically rich title. Some design issues and repetitive activities aside, this program is a worthwhile choice for its educationally solid learning games. 

Update 2005: This program is now available in a bundle (along with two other full CD-ROMs) entitled: Kindergarten Bundle (Pooh Kindergarten, Mickey Kindergarten, and Phonics Quest) This is an excellent bundle that includes Mickey Kindergarten, Winnie the Pooh Kindergarten, and Phonics Quest reviewed above--all titles we recommend, for the price of one.