Telling the Time and Money are two new educational programs for young children and both come on a single cassette.
I thought I'd try the programs out, then try them on my five-year-old son and his six-year-old friend. Finally, I unleashed them on three children aged six, seven and eight who go to a nearby school.
In Money, several coins are drawn on the screen in various colours, with letters in lower case above them. Then an amount, say £1.58, is written beneath them. The child then has to make up the money by choosing the coins by letter. As coins are chosen, different tones sound, pitched according to the coins' values. Different coloured screens also show the child's score for a set of games, from a black up to a gold screen. Telling the Time asks the player to spell out the time shown on a clock face in words, and words only.
I tried out Money first. The coins appeared on the screen, and the amount which I had to make up showed up underneath. So far, so good. Unfortunately, I could not recognise the coins, which were unnumbered, and so I got my sums wrong.
Neither my son nor his friend could do it, except for low amounts like 39p or 65p. Of the other three children, the seven and eight-year-olds had problems recognising the coins. The youngest, like my son, could do the simpler ones, but was completely foxed by larger sums.
Telling The Time got much the same results. I tried it, I got it wrong. For this lesson, there must be absolutely no use of numbers when spelling out the time, and apparently it's wrong to say "A quarter to nine". I should write "Quarter to nine", or so the computer informed me.
The youngest of my school trio could read, and got some of the words right with his older sister's help, though she got some of the times wrong. The eight-year-old, like me, failed on the computer 'grammar'.
The graphics for Telling The Time were good, but a clock is a clock is a clock - and there's not a lot you can do with it. Maybe it would be better depicted as a cuckoo-clock or Big Ben?