| ★ AMSTRAD CPC ★ GAMESLIST ★ PLAYSCHOOL (c) SCHOOL SOFTWARE ★ |
Amstrad Action |
Play School, for the three-plus agegroup, consists with a selection of tiny games. Some are of educational use, others - well, they just pass the time of day. When you first run the program, a few instructions appear on the screen, telling you which keys you can press, and what they do. Write them down or remember them, as no reference is made to the keys further on in the program. You are then asked to press P to play the game. At this stage, pressing Shift-Q will set the level of difficulty. Alternatively, P will take you off to a party, where after several seconds gazing at a less-than-mouthwatering graphical cake, you are introduced to Superkid, the question master. He promptly asks for your name - you type in your name and press Enter. On completion of all the introductory messages, you get a menu with six options. These range from simple addition problems to trying your hand at drawing. The first option is 'Counting'. A large box is drawn on screen and a number of objects appear inside. You must count them up and enter the correct number. Superkid is watching you throughout your ordeal - his eyes occasionaly blink -but for the most part, he is cold and stony. He shows either displeasure (when answering wrong) in the form of turning his mouth down, or admiration (of correct answers) by grinning broadly. You are given three chances to answer a question correctly. After a third failure the answer is displayed and the next question in a sequence of three is displayed. A correct answer merits a point in your favour; incorrect and it's face down. After answering the three questions, either Whizkid will choose which set of questions you will try next or you will get to choose again (this seems to be at random). Moving down the table of choices, we come to 'Find It'. A letter or number is displayed on the screen, and the child then has to search for it. This is a good way to teach children how to associate one thing with another. The next option, 'Paint Box', is rather a limited drawing utility. Only one colour is allowed on screen (the child can choose this colour). Movement is via the cursor keys, so I'm afraid that you are restricted to straight lines (or crooked ones at least). It may hold children's interest for a while, but when they wish to improve on their designs, they will be stuck. AGE 3-7 Item four is "Match Up". Six odd-looking patterns are drawn on the screen; a further one is drawn apart from the previous six. The child is to match the seventh object with one of the other six. The next item is not one of the smoothest, fastest arcade-action games available on any home micro. You control a Pacman lookalike, whose sole task is to eat any stationary objects in its path. The last but by no means least of these options is 'How Much'. This sets a fairly reasonable little addition test for your primary-school kid. A box with a number of items appears; you must type the correct number as with 'Counting'. Then another box is drawn with objects inside. Do the same action as before. Then you must add the objects from both boxes together and type this total. On the whole, this is a well-presented package, with some nice touches, especially Superkid with his flicking eyelids and mouth movements. The options available will no doubt prove valuable teaching aids for the youngsters, and more importantly, keep them interested. There is a nice suprise awaiting those that opt for one of the sets of questions. Included with many of the questions arc small diagrams related to the subject it makes all the difference. The style of answering and marking questions is identical to those from Chemistry. Again, once all the questions have been answered, there is nothing more to be gained from the package. It would have been quite simple to include extra questions that could be loaded up whenever required. In that way, the user would aquire a much broader knowledge of the topic at hand. What would have been nice was a graph showing how well you had done after answering the questions from all the topics, possibly giving you an average mark at the same instant. Slowly but surely the educational market is coming to its senses. If you compare the titles reviewed here with those back in the April issue of AA - well, there can be no comparison; real progress is being made. AMSTRAD ACTION #15 |
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Page créée en 562 millisecondes et consultée 1141 fois L'Amstrad CPC est une machine 8 bits à base d'un Z80 à 4MHz. Le premier de la gamme fut le CPC 464 en 1984, équipé d'un lecteur de cassettes intégré il se plaçait en concurrent du Commodore C64 beaucoup plus compliqué à utiliser et plus cher. Ce fut un réel succès et sorti cette même années le CPC 664 équipé d'un lecteur de disquettes trois pouces intégré. Sa vie fut de courte durée puisqu'en 1985 il fut remplacé par le CPC 6128 qui était plus compact, plus soigné et surtout qui avait 128Ko de RAM au lieu de 64Ko. |
