Cyberchase Carnival Chaos
© 2003 Riverdeep, Inc.
We couldn't bribe our testers to stay for more than five minutes with this science/logic game, based on the PBS cartoon Cyberchase. The adventure game embeds eight challenging, poorly designed activities in a good vs. evil theme. The story involves a search for a lost spaceship part, and an effort to spoil the plans of a villain named Hacker. After signing in, players can choose either adventure or practice modes, the latter for jumping straight to an activity. The eight puzzles attempt to expose children to higher level logic strategies like planning (change switches in a maze to direct robots), spatial relations (bump the bad guys out of a ring) and so on. Problems with this program include a complex, abstract story line combined with a complex main menu that doesn't help you understand where you are in the adventure. The biggest problem lies in the activities, which are laden with complexity. There are as many as five steps involved to shoot a supersoaker at a planet, for instance, and launching a pinball requires three different, not obvious steps. The user's guide (on the disk as a PDF) doesn't help much either. The activities offer multiple levels, and it is possible to save progress or adjust the volume of the repetitive background music. This title gives children the message that science is hard and confusing, when actually the design is the only thing that is so. This is the wrong kind of problem solving. Note that a similarly designed sister program is called Cyberchase Castleblanca Quest.
$24.95, Windows/Mac
Teaches: logic, math, physics, programming