Time To Learn

This is an attractively presented package, designed to heip children to tell the time and set the clock. Its recommended age range is from four to nine years.

Each of the first six available options uses a colourful screen display which consists of a large clock face, a ladder with a small man positioned half way up it, and a happy face or sad face depending on whether or not the correct answer is entered.

The first three options are telling hours, telling minutes, and telling hours and minutes together. For each of these the child has to enter the appropriate number of hours or minutes, or both together.

If the right answer is given they are rewarded with the appealing "happy face" smiling, and little ladder-man climbing up two rungs on the ladder.

If the wrong answer is given then the "sad face" grimaces, the incorrect time is displayed on the clock and the child is invited to try again.

If another incorrect answer is entered, after displaying the child's entry on the clock the correct answer is shown. Each incorrect entry made causes the ladder-man to climb down one rung of the ladder.

If the stage is completed so that the man reaches the top of the ladder before a total of 15 entries are made, he dances to a tune (the volume is adjust able!) and plants a flag.

This flag is carried over for each individual child to the next stage, so a series of flags can be collected.

For telling hours, the hour hand only is displayed and it points at random to any of the hour numbers on the clock face.

Similarly for telling minutes, the minute hand only is displayed and it points randomly to any number of minutes from 0 to 60 on the clock face.

One of the available menu options is to set the minute intervals to either one or five minutes so that this can be made more challenging for older children.

If the child enters an answer within plus or minus three minutes of the correct time then "CLOSE!" appears on the screen, the ladder-man goes up one step, and the child is invited to try again.

The next three menu options are setting hours, setting minutes and setting both together. In these, the clock is required to be set, by pressing the H and M keys.

The response for a correct or incorrect entry is the same as for the first three options except that for incorrect responses the child is told what time he set the clock to, and then invited to have another go.

For setting both hours and minutes, moving the minute hand causes the hour hand to be correctly positioned relative to the hour marks, to give a more accurate representation.

The minute intervals can be set as before to one or five minute accuracy. The seventh menu option is the BES monitoring system, which holds detailed information on the responses of the last six users of the program.

This lets the teacher or parent access each record and see each child's name, how much time he took, which options were attempted and the responses to each question.

These are shown with the time settings asked in white, correct entries made in green and incorrect entries in red. It also shows whether one or five minute intervals were chosen and whether hours or minutes or both were being tested.

This comprehensive monitoring system is a particularly valuable feature of the package. It enables the teacher or parent to evaluate each child's particular difficulties or achievements.

This is an entertaining and highly instructive program which has been thoughtfully designed to appeal to children and to be as useful as possible for guided learning either at home or in the classroom.

Jane Jackson