This program comes on cassette in a package with a Puffin book of the same name, which has apparently sold 86,000 copies to date. It enables a child (assumed to be in the 7-11 age range) to fill in a lot of slightly tacky-sounding lists - Dad's statistics, Mum as I see her, My Room, My Brothers and Sisters, etc.

The program is more or less a straight crib of the book - indeed, it mirrors faithfully the concept of filling in your own lists and on the computer you even have a secret password which purports to prevent people of a snooping nature from reading your file after you've written it to tape.

It doesn't really work though. If I were a parent keen to introduce my child to the concept of a database on computer, even though I didn't know much about computers, I'd quickly come to the conclusion that books whose pages you can flip and write in (as in the Puffin) are a much faster and more convenient medium than a computer using a cassette tape as a storage medium. A little more imagination - such as the inclusion of a SORT or SELECT IF function - would have gone a long way towards taking this package from the dreary to the useful.