Playhouse Disney Preschool Time Online
© 2005 Disney Online
If you have a preschooler, the Web, and Windows under the same roof, keep reading—as long as you're not too tired. Disney Interactive Group, best known for Toontown, has launched an innovative $50/year preschool online service, demonstrating that it is possible to deliver quality web-based learning, for the most discriminating of all audiences—young children. The first week of content; a unit on social development called "Braver Behavior" contains games on par in quality and responsivity with CD-ROM based products. Here's how it works. After you make your online purchase, you must download an 85 MB file that consists of traditional C++ programming to your hard drive. This process takes about 30 minutes on a standard DSL connection. The next step is to customize the experience for as many as five children. By putting in a child's birthday, the program starts a birthday countdown. You can also put in favorite colors, shapes, and print a membership card. To start the program from this point on, children can click on a desktop icon, which starts an application that uses Microsoft Internet Explorer's ActiveX technology. This takes over the browser, locking out the rest of the web, and filling the entire screen with smooth animation and continually updated content. The downside of this is that you have to disable firewalls, a process that can be a bit technical. Each unit starts with an introduction of seven new activities, by Bear (of "Bear and the Big Blue House"). There are letter and number themes for the week, as well as seasonal themes. All of the games we tested are heavy on sorting, matching, letter recognition, shape recognition and logical thinking. We liked how each has an active component that keeps children busy (popping balloons with numbers on them, for example). As you would expect, the service is thick with Disney themes. The site was developed in partnership with the studio ImaginEngine, with help from Debra Lieberman (Reader Rabbit), and members of the original Living Books team. This initiative is important because it symbolizes a shift in children's interactive media, from CD to web; from static to dynamic; without a drop in quality. It also represents what may be a successful subscription-based model for children's digital content. If this succeeds, others will probably follow. Note that Disney is offering free accounts to Libraries. Visit www.preschooltime.com/library for details.
$49.95, Internet Site, Win 98, Win XP, Windows 98, Windows XP
Teaches: language, reading, upper/lower case, decoding, storytelling, comprehension, deductive reasoning, memory, spatial reasoning, patterns, counting, numeral recognition, adding, intrapersonal problem solving
CTR Rating: 96%