Tag: Edutainment

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From the archive: this review first ran on the Mac Gaming Alliance (MGA), the Mac games site that lived here on DimensionZ in the late 1990s. It was published around 1998 and is reproduced as originally written. More in the Mac Gaming Alliance archive.

“Learn to Speak French” is one product from The Learning Company’s line of “Learn to Speak” products. This product helps the person who doesn’t know how to speak French, learn enough to help them navigate a French speaking region. The program is organized into chapters which lead the user from the basics (the verb “to be”, etc.) to more advanced topics such as future tense and more. Each chapter acts out as if it is part of a story.

Gameplay

When you first start up this program, you can go through a slide show type presentation of French culture including art, food, architecture, and more. You can press a key or click the mouse button to finish the presentation and go to a menu where you can select a chapter. Once you choose a chapter it will give you a brief description of what you will learn in that chapter and then take you into the first section, Vocabulary. In this section you can select the different words that are going to be used in that chapter learn what they mean, and how they sound. You can then record your own voice and listen to the proper pronunciation in comparison to yours. You can use this to learn the vocabulary but I think they could have created a better way to learn it like giving you a word and then showing you how it can be used in an example or two.

You can then continue onto the next section which is The Story. This gives you the story of what happens to you in this chapter. This, as with all of the other sections, allows you to record your pronunciation and compare it to the recorded one. This is neat because it allows you to see the vocabulary in use but if you donít understand something, you have to go searching through the text/workbook to find what it means in English. This, however, isnít all that bad because if you are serious about learning French then you should have the text/workbook with you and opened to the right section anyway.

The next section is The Action. This is similar to The Story section but this one has video so it is more appealing. Other than the video, it is pretty much the same as The Story section.

We now come along to some exercises. First is Listening Skills. In this exercise, you listen to a spoken word from The Action section and then find the correct place for it. You then have to type it in correctly in that space. Next we have Drag and Match in which you have to drag a particular word from the center and drop it on its matching word based on grammatical and syntax rules. There may be more than one Drag and Match screen depending on the chapter. The next exercise is Word Jumble in which you must re-arrange words into the correct order using sentence structure and syntax rules. The last exercise is Communication Skills. In this section you must respond to sentences with either a voice or written response. If you do a voice response then you must listen to the correct answer and indicate if that is what you said.

Enfin (Finally), the last section is the Games section. This includes different games which are well known but with a twist. They have been changed so that you must use French to play them. This helps you review what you have learned while having some fun. In addition, some of the ways they have implemented these games makes they very enjoyable because of the characters in some of the games and the thought put into the objective of some of the made up games.

This game includes lots of sound and video clips which make it much more inviting to learn the language as well as an easy to learn and use interface.

Conclusion

If you are looking for a program that will help you learn to speak French or just reinforce up on your skills that you may have learned in school and have basically forgotten then you should consider this program a good choice. I didnít encounter any bugs and if you are also a Windows user then you may like the fact that the CDs have both a Macintosh version and a Windows version on them. Overall, this is a good choice for a program to help you learn French.

Find a copy

Learn to Speak French has been out of print for years, but used copies of the original Mac release still turn up, and some classics have been re-released for modern systems. Search for Learn to Speak French on Amazon.

Ratings use the MGA’s original 1–5 apple scale. Prices, system requirements and web links in this review are from the time it was written.

This post has affiliate links. If you buy through them, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Learn more.

From the archive: this review first ran on the Mac Gaming Alliance (MGA), the Mac games site that lived here on DimensionZ in the late 1990s. It was published around 1998 and is reproduced as originally written. More in the Mac Gaming Alliance archive.

Have your kids take a drive through Tonka Search & Rescue (ages 4 and up), where my bet is they’ll have a grand time saving people and making repairs using backhoes, cranes, dump trucks and other cool Tonka vehicles.

Gameplay

When you enter Search & Rescue you meet a robust Tonka Joe, dressed for rescue, who introduces you to the dispatch center, which is the screen from which you can choose any of the five main activities, each introduced by a character. Hallelujah that two of the five characters are women with one, Rudy Forest the zookeeper, being a minority and the other, Suzy Sparks, being in a non-standard job for a woman (she’s in charge of the garage). That was a big plus for me, the mother of a 6-year-old daughter. The activities themselves seem to be legitimate in terms of number, work required and length of time to complete. Kids can go to Suzy’s garage, where they can equip and customize fire trucks and other vehicles. Choosing “Coach Blaze” means you’ll get a tour of the Tonka Academy where three skills are taught; fire fighting and rescue using a helicopter or motor boat. The meatiest activities, however, are the three missions, which are disaster scenes that the player must clean up and rebuild. One revolves around the burning dock warehouse. The second deals with the aftermath of an earthquake at a zoo in which animals have been set loose, cages wrecked and roads cracked. In the last, old New England fisherman “Nate Cod” takes you through a flooded neighborhood where neighbors need rescuing. For each mission kids accomplish, they get an award certificate from the print center along with a newspaper article featuring their heroism. They can also print out Tonka team member badges, license plates and sheets of patterns to cut out and assemble into construction sites. Envision your computer area awash in paper.

Graphics and Sound

The graphics don’t attempt to be photo quality, but rather feel like colorful cartoons that are not too busy to look at. The lion stretches, the St. Bernard pants, the river water runs and gurgles. Best of all, each scenario has a number of faceless little people, some of whom are victims while others are members of the rescue crew. For example, if during firefighter practice at Tonka Academy you don’t put out a manufactured blaze with some speed, the little firefighter helpers sit down and start playing cards. If you wait long enough, they’ll curl up, go to sleep and snore. In terms of detail, the pilings at the harbor have algae growing on them, the power drill in the garage zips loudly like a power drill, the flags wave in the breeze. When you click on vehicles, their engines start and continue to hum until they drive off the screen after completing an activity.

Difficulty

The program literature says it encourages kids “to use problem-solving skills, rescue know-how and imagination to get missions accomplished.” I didn’t find this to be the case. Each mission scenario begins by telling kids what to do first and brings them the proper vehicle. It would be better to have a selection of four vehicles at the top of the screen in order to give kids a chance to figure out which is the best vehicle for the job. Telling kids which jobs to do and when gives them little chance to problem-solve or prioritize. What the program does well, however, is teach persistence and task completion, which leads to my next point.

Interface

The program excelled at what I called the Patience/Frustration Factor, which is both good and bad. My kids had a hard time maneuvering the vehicles sometimes because it requires a sense of perspective. Take the helicopter at the zoo. You position it in a place you believe to be above the lion, yet when you drop the rescue basket, it lands two inches below the lion. That means you have to move the helicopter up and try dropping the basket again so it gets close enough so the lion will jump in. The same goes for using the backhoe to pick up boxes and pipes on the dock, etc. It’s frustrating to start with, but I found it gratifying that my daughter had to try again and again before getting it right. Besides, once a kid learns the feel of the vehicles, it’s a lot easier the second time. Keep in mind that you should run the program on a machine with a fast processor. otherwise is really tough to maneuver the vehicles. That’s what I found by trying it on my Quadra 840AV (too slow) then on my PowerMac (just right).

Find a copy

Tonka Search and Rescue has been out of print for years, but used copies of the original Mac release still turn up, and some classics have been re-released for modern systems. Search for Tonka Search and Rescue on Amazon.

Ratings use the MGA’s original 1–5 apple scale. Prices, system requirements and web links in this review are from the time it was written.