First things first. The packaging of the Griffin Software tapes is attractive and tough. These are important points when considering the wear and tear enthusiastic children will provide.

The manual is short but carefully presented and caused no confusion for adult or child. There is no doubt that even the five to nine age range quickly learn how to LOAD and RUN programs by themselves.

The title page merely leads on to a simple menu with choices of addition questions (+), subtraction (-) or mixed (M) questions. Included on the screen is the instruction to press RETURN. A second menu allows for the range of numbers to be chosen, 0 to anything up to 99. A summary is given of the choices made.

The game now begins. The child has two pieces of information displayed left and right of the action; one is the score so far; the other the number of stars rewarded for a correct answer. The question itself is printed in clearly spaced bold type at the top of the screen.

The graphics consist of a column (military parlance) of tanks driving from left to right across the screen. A line of bombs and aircraft are drawn beneath the question. The idea is to bomb the tank which contains the correct answer. The use of military hardware (even simulated) to teach children has been called into question, and Griffin themselves have acknowledge the criticism and are considering the point.

Personally I think it would be safer to use a sporting context and thus avoid a computer game cliche. There are plenty of shoot-'em-up games so perhaps Fisher Marriot (the programmers) could exercise a little more imagination.

Strangely the BREAK key is not protected. The ESCAPE key however is (it re-starts the program) and the error-trapping is sound. Numberfun2 follows the same procedure but asks the child to shoot firework rockets from a milk bottle to hit clouds. Both displays are colourful but not breathtaking.

Peter MujtabaVijay Sundaram