Boxes Keep Young Students Engrossed

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Box Of Treasures contains five programs related to the theme of boxes, though each can be used in a variety of situations.

The Adventure uses excellent animated Mode 7 graphics for 15 locations on a 3 x 5 grid. You explore to discover your task, but the idea is to rescue Henry, find the magician and choose from three possible endings.

There are no red herrings, blind alleys or deaths. Children thought it superb, apart from the cursor controls being the wrong way round, as in pressing the up key to move down.

Box Draw produces complex eight colour designs by drawing up to 100 rectangles. You can fill in, half fill, outline or delete, the scale can be altered and picture position changed.

Blank is a most useful utility with endless applications - you can design forms containing up to 40 vertical lines, 40 horizontal lines and 30 text strings in a choice of three line thicknesses and two text heights.

Make-a-Box can be used as an introduction to a boxes project, or simply to stimulate the imagination.

Choose the characteristics and details of a box, and the design is drawn on screen.

The two former programs have editing facilities and the results of all three can be saved, loaded or dumped to a printer. Create is the weakest part of an excellent package. Stories can be created with static or animated Mode 7 illustrations, but producing anything worth while is time consuming.

The program is not particularly user-friendly and there are several error trapping bugs.

Frequent disc changeovers are required and the program hangs up if a child accidentally inserts the data disc instead of the program disc, and all data is lost.

Also the option of deleting a picture from a set does not work.

Two Epson screen dumps, five example files and a 55 minute audio tape of three stories are also included in this first class package.

Six information booklets provide a wealth of follow-up ideas to stimulate work across the curriculum away from the computer.

This package is different from previous 4mation products, but you will quickly recognise its value when you use it. Despite my criticisms of Create, I would strongly recommend it to any class teacher.

Jim McHugh