Punctuation Pete

Personal Computer News

Theodora Wood

Punctuation Pete, Ballooning, Car Journey, Special Agent (£9.95 each), Heinemann (Five Ways Software), Heinemann Computers in Education: Book, [redacted]. PLAY TO LEARN Learning can be fun with open-ended games. Theodora Wood investigates some Spectrum software. Heinemann, one of the large educational software publishing houses, has produced four software packages 'designed by a team of 24 teachers and educational advisers from the Dudley Metropolitan County'. Each tape is accompanied by a glossy booklet that not only tells you how to operate the program but also contains interesting background information and suggestions for other activities associated with it. Overlays for the keyboard provide an easy method of controlling the programs which are aimed at the 8-12 age range. Punctuation Pete is the most traditional of the four packages in its use of graphics and educational methodology. Pete himself is a rather jolly character who moves along a line of text displayed on the screen and stops at all the spaces between the words to enable the child to enter the correct punctuation or capital letter. There are four levels of reading difficulty to select and three levels of punctuation difficulty. After correcting the punctuation the child has to press ENTER and Pete will either jump for joy if it is correct, or walk to the first mistake. Three attempts are allowed before the correct punctuation is given. Punctuation Pete introduces children of this age to elementary word-processing skills as well as being an interesting way to learn punctuation. Ballooning is a simulation program which involves flying a hot air balloon over a series of landscapes. The child can take off, fly and land a balloon by operating the burner and the vent controls. Three levels of difficulty can be chosen: Flying School, Flying Test or Live Mission. Flying School allows the child to practice at the controls of the balloon in all phases of flight. Flying Test tests these flying skills, and Live Mission gives a series of tasks to be performed, but only if the balloon is landed in the designated spot. Hazards are also introduced, such as instrumentation failure or high winds. The balloon flies over the landscape on the top half of the screen, while the instrument panel displays the rate of climb, temperature of the air inside the balloon, altitude and fuel level. The program operates in real time which makes it more vivid. A pause facility stops the balloon moving and allows the information on the dials to be assimilated and recorded. This leads to such activities as keeping graphs of the relationship between the temperature of the air inside and outside the balloon and its altitude. Car Journey is not as immediately accessible as the other two packages discussed. The objective is to make money by running a delivery service, and this is not as compulsive as flying a balloon, especially for the younger children in the age group. There are four difficulty levels: Driving School, Driving School with hazards, Delivery Service and Delivery Service with hazards. The type of car can be selected: they appear on the screen with each one of the four shown in profile with maximum speed, capacity for fuel and a petrol consumption graph. Driving School enables the child to move around the country and work out how much petrol has been used, and also the positions of the major cities in England, Scotland and Wales. On the lefthand side of the screen there is a space for hazard reports, a speedometer displaying speed controlled by keys 1 and 2, a bar chart of fuel consumption and a digital readout which indicates time elapsed since the beginning of the journey. Delivery Service enables the child to see contracts available by pressing 0, BREAK SPACE to cycle through them and ENTER to choose one. Contracts vary from computer parts to Persian carpets, with pickup and delivery places and times. One business colleague loved the way the money bags mounted up on the progress chart (seen by pressing 6) and wished his office programs were the same. Hazards include snow and road repairs, the everyday occurrences which can lay waste a delivery timetable. The booklet covers the history of roads, how a car works, and again plenty of suggestions and games to extend its use. I think perhaps the difficulty level is too high for the younger children of the age group who showed little interest after the excitements ofBallooning. The upper level could probably be extended to 14 and beyond. Special Agent, the fourth, is an adventure quiz game based on the idea of catching an enemy spy moving round Europe, rather similar to the BBC's Puzzle Trail. Pressing 6 will bring a map of Europe to the screen with all the main cities marked. Intelligence reports appear at the bottom of the screen while the top lefthand corner displays total cost so far, day number and time elapsed. The time between these reports can be speeded up by pressing 7. These reports can be very cryptic: some of them are based on the descriptions of the major cities given in the booklet while others would need an atlas or an adult to help. Other reports are in code. There is a facility to stop the clock to give the child time to decode the message. Sometimes an informer will be willing to sell information and this can be bought for £100. To travel to other cities in hot pursuit of the spy, air and rail departures can be checked through and chosen. The user can also see the timetables for other cities so that a journey can be planned in two stages if required. This said, Special Agent provides a vehicle by which a child in the 9-14 age range can become aware of the positions of the major cities of Europe, and the distances and relative travelling times between them, it also involves them in the logical process of route planning with timetables, and the brainteasers in the codes. Heinemann has produced an impressive range of programs as its first move into the educational software market.

Ballooning... attempting to land

Car journey... setting off

Pete punctuating