My Virtual Tutor Reading

$30, Nintendo DS

Teaches: Reading

CTR Rating: 80%

CTR Review

Note: This title was re-released in 2010 as "My Reading Tutor."Designed to turn your Nintendo DS into a self-paced reading tutor that can track progress, My Virtual Tutor - Reading comes as three separate titles: Pre-K to K, K-1, and 1-2. We looked at a "final beta" of the K-1 title, and were more impressed with the concept than the overly designed presentation. Each titles costs $30, and comes with eight phonetically written stories, with titles like "C is for Cap" and "Animal Faces." After you sign into one of the three available game save slots, you turn the DS sideways, like a book, an choose from a menu that offers books, phonics games and quizzes. The books can be read by a narrator, or "explored" by tapping on missing bits of text, that can be filled in by tracing letters, rubbing the screen to uncover the word gradually, or by recording your own version of the sentence, using the Nintendo DS microphone. This is the only part of this program that shines. Most of the other content is dry and workbook-like that may require bribes to get a child to finish.Testers noted that the flash card of "fog" looked like gray stones, and that in one of the jumbled word games, you're given the letters S I D K. But "disk" is counted as a wrong answer. The only correct answer is "kids." The overall design is clunky at best, with looping music-box music as the default option, and moving navigation icons that are distracting. Options include the ability to set your computer for left or right handedness, and the ability to turn off the background music. It is also easy for a child to get out of any activity, at any point. All in all, given the Nintendo DS delivery mechanism, this title should be a consideration as a reading supplement, and while we'd like to see a smoother design, this isn't a bad collection of phonics games. Reading teachers will want to know that the reading content is based on the "Foundations to Literacy" approach, which was developed at the University of Colorado by Barbara Wise and others. The game was created by 1st Playable Productions using Engine Software, for the Center for Computational Language and Education Research at the University of Colorado.