Peter Rabbit's Math Garden
Sold Out		(Win95/98) (Retail) (004935)

Mindscape

Children

Ages: 4 to 8

Ratings:

4 stars from CD-ROM Today

3 1/2 out of 4 stars from HomePC

A Rich, Playful Adventure in Learning

Enter a charming, animated world based on Beatrix Potter's classic characters, and discover the best way to learn: through fun and games!

In this delightful interactive playland, your child will learn number concepts through four skill-building activities. Each is as fun as it is enriching, and each has three age-appropriate levels of difficulty.

Every activity rewards children with seeds they can use to plant their own interactive garden. As their math skills grow, their garden grows too.

Peter Rabbit's Math Garden is a wonderful way for children to play, learn, and gain confidence in their knowledge of basic arithmetic.

Special Features:

Four educational games - each with three levels of play - help your child develop essential math skills.

Learning activities reward your child with seeds used to plant a personal garden that grows.

Hand-illustrated animation, colorful graphics, engaging music, talking characters, and a child-tested interface bring the enchanting world of PeterRabbit to life.

Even pre-readers can play and learn in Peter Rabbit's Math Garden, since no reading skills are required.

Children can explore at their own pace, and are rewarded and entertained.

Print out garden scenes for your child to color.

The program automatically tracks your child's progress.

Requirements:

Windows - 486DX 33, 8 MB RAM, Windows 95 or Windows 3.1, double speed CD-ROM drive, SVGA 640x480 256 colors, 4MB available on hard drive, Windows compatible sound card, Microsoft compatible mouse.

Reviews:

CD-ROM Today, May 1996

"...Not content to merely look pretty or tell a charming story, it enlists the help of Peter, Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail to teach basic math concepts. This CD-ROM is no less beautiful than its sibling [The Adventures of Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny]; you can easily get carried away just by looking at it.

"The math lessons are couched in a series of games appropriate for 4- to 8-year-old children. There's a matching game, in which kids help Peter escape from mean Mr. McGregor, and a sorting game, in which they help the frog, Jermey Fisher, catch and categorize fish. There are also addition and subtraction games, and counting and ordering games - each of which has three difficulty levels. Each time a player finishes a game, they're rewarded with radishes, which they can trade for items to improve Peter Rabbit's garden.

"Beatrix Potter probably never imagined her books being used to teach math, but with Peter Rabbit's Math Garden, Mindscape has done a wonderful job of adapting her characters to the task."

HomePC, July 1996

"...introduces basic math skills with the help of familiar characters: Mrs. Tittlemouse asks children to sweep away a certain number of bugs from her house; Mr. Jeremy Fisher enlists players' help to sort the fish he catches to serve at a party; and Peter himself needs assistance in matching numbers of objects to numerals and equations before finding a place to hide from Mr. McGregor.

"Four skill-building activities increase in difficulty as players answer questions correctly. Math Garden also comes with a coloring and activity book that kids can play with away from the keyboad. And after each round, it's Radish Time, a lively activity in which animated radishes fall from the top of the screen. Children click on as many radishes as they can until time's up; each one they collect can be traded for seeds to grow in Mr. McGregor's garden for Peter's next meal."

Piece of Trivia -

Peter Rabbit has been a favorite children's book since 1902, when he took his first bite out of Mr. McGregor's garden in The Tales of Peter Rabbit. But when Mindscape decided to do a multimedia version of Peter's story, adapting a nearly century-old literary treasure to CD-ROM while retaining its essence posed a challenge.

Mindscape wanted to present Peter's world in a panoramic 360-degree view - what it calls "Explorascape" - that would let children feel a part of that world. But Potter's famous watercolor illustrations were close-ups of its inhabitants and partial views of the landscape.

To get a look at the environment that inspired the drawings, the software development team flew to England and walked the grounds of Potter's estate. "We needed to preserve the integrity of 100 years of Peter Rabbit," says Rosemary Yates, Mindscape's senior producer for the series. "If you work from the book and look up from the back gate through the barnyard, you see the view we were trying to re-create."

Four watercolor artists were enlisted to produce the electronic Explorascape. The result of their efforts is the panoramic view of Peter's world in two discs relesed so far - interative environments that surely would make Potter proud.