Edmark creates five separate areas of interest in this CD-ROM: the Stocktopus, Photo Twister, Fripple Place, Carving Blox, and Half Time. Each of these areas is designed for a specific educational goal.
The first three sections have question and answer modes that provide a series of puzzles to test and build reasoning skills. Thinkin' Things adjusts the difficulty of the puzzles as they are successfully completed. Using a "parent's mode," parents can track a child's progress, manually set the difficulty, control other aspects of the interface, and check the player's progress.
Stocktopus is a brokerage operation. Starting with an initial set of possessions and a number of possible trading options the object is to trade until you acquire the target set of objects. This takes place in a worldwide brokerage, giving the young trader a chance to trade with a group of polite animal brokers who greet and thank their callers in their own language from all over the globe.
Photo Twister has 22 different "twisters." These are cute little green men with a special ability to affect digital images. This activity is either a great way to play with images or solve visual puzzles by using the digital transformations to change plain image into a target image by deducing what transformations were used to create it.
Fripple Place has a bunch of Fripples that need to get to their rooms. The clues are in the hotel rooms and the goal is to pick up and place the Fripples in their rooms. The clues increase in difficulty quite quickly; at the most advanced level they're really challenging!
The next two sections are for exploration, creativity, and just plain fun. These sections provide a number of ideas as starting points for experimentation and enhancement but both of them are essentially tool boxes and work surfaces to play on. In Carving Blox a blank slate is presented for the study of physical principles. Tools are presented to carve the workspace, add ramps and walls, change the friction, gravity and tilt of the table.
A designer can add balls of various weights and put in springs that will set the initial momentum of the balls. Then when the creation is complete, a freeze/unfreeze button unleashes the balls-physics determines the rest. The simulation can be stopped and edited at any time. Finally Half Time is an exercise in visual programming. It's basically a subset of Logo with different casts of characters that are programmed by you to walk, turn, act silly and paint their way through a half time show on your stadium.
There were some glitches in Edmark's product. I use Windows 3.11 on my machines so that's the only operating system I can speak to. Thinkin' Things 3 won't work on all graphics cards. It uses Win32S system enhancements that it installs during the setup. When I loaded it on a 486 box with an ATI Graphics Ultra Pro (Mach 32) everything in the new program group worked, except the Thinkin' Things 3 itself. All it did was paint the Edmark logo all over my screen. Their tech support said they couldn't fix it since I already had the latest drivers from ATI. They suggested that I might try Windows 95! I did get it to run on another Windows 3.11 machine with a Diamond Speedstar 64, but it doesn't work too well with Windows, the machine must be rebooted when I exit the game. Looks like more pressure to move to Windows 95!
Edmark recommends this for an age range of 7 to 13 years, probably because of the reading involved in the Fripple Place, but the user interface is intuitive enough for younger children to use and the graphics are enough to intrigue them for hours.
Charlie Amacher is a software engineer at hewlett Packard in Corvallis, OR. He can be reached at charlie@cv.hp.com..
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