Story Logic: Jungle Animals
© 2007 Smart Neurons
Designed to let children create their own stories, this language experience is a prime example of a weak, non-interactive design. Children first choose which animals to include in their story by pressing either the left or right mouse buttons, which takes some getting used to. For example, to respond to the question, "Should we put a parrot in the story?" you would press the left button for "yes" or the right button for "no". All instructions and questions are read aloud to you, and the instructions cannot be bypassed. There are four pages in each story, and one question per page is given. Therefore, if you answer "no" to a question on a page, another question is given, to which you will need to answer "yes". Only after the completion of the tedious task of answering questions on each page is the story read to you. We created stories using this program with a five-year-old tester, and I felt that it didn't allow him to be creative. He answered a question, and then an entire page of a story was created; however, it wasn't any of his language. You can really only write about the monkey, tiger and elephant, but the panther, hippo and a few other jungle friends can be other characters in the story. Once the character selection is made, you can't changed your mind — there is no going back. Also, there is no way to print a copy of your story, or adjust the challenge. In addition, as the stories are read to you, the words aren't highlighted, so there is no way for children to follow along. All in all, this program falls far short of its claim of "building intelligence" and "improving social skills."
$25, Windows XP, Mac OSX
Teaches: language, reading, storytelling
CTR Rating: 40%