Have you ever had cause to ask someone for directions - where's Any Street, which is the quickest way to the Post Office, how far is it to the nearest garage It's usually my luck to ask another visitor or someone who insists on sending me via Timbuktu. In future, I'll be hoping for a child who has made use of this program.

Town is a suite of programs: Townplan, Townprint, Towngame. The first allows a map to be created, the second gives a printout on an Epson printer and the third allows "a person" to be moved around the map. The facility to create maps means that work can be based on any town or village, real or imaginary and, as a number of levels of communication are permitted between the children and the computer, one is presented with a teacher's delight - a resource which 'can be effectively used with virtually all ages and levels of ability'.

The package also includes a datafile, Towndat, together with two printed copies of the map, which can be used as an example in the Towngame. In this program the teacher/parent, or another child, defines a route (starting point, a number of checkpoints, i.e. places the children should visit whilst making their journey) and finishing point. This is easily achieved using the cursor keys and mnemonic commands - Start, Check point, End.

When this has been done the game options allow Keyboard commands, eg N to go North, plus the number of steps; simple commands, eg North 5; complex commands, e.g. Walk East along the High Street as far as the Post Office - in this option time penalties for incorrect answers can also be introduced; and last a Program option, in which the children are required to enter a sequence of complex commands to complete the route. The results option enables the teacher to monitor the groups' activities and, if necessary, redefine the route or select a more suitable option for one or more of the groups.

Of course, the real beauty of Town is that, using Townplan, the user can create a map of his/her own village, town, area around the school, the school itself, from an OS map or the imagination. This needs to be designed on squared paper first. The program only allows vertical and horizontal lines to be drawn, so the map has to be representational, which is a useful task in itself for older children.

The roads are drawn using the cursor keys with pen up, down and erase facilities, and named by moving the cursor to the beginning of the road and typing in the name - this does not appear on the screen. The final option permits the positioning of various buildings and features on the map, eg church, trees, telephone boxes, houses. Ten symbols are already built into the program and 20 further may be added using a single character from the keyboard. Having saved the map as a datafile. this can be used in Towngame as described above for the sample file Map reading, direction finding, giving clear and concise instructions, route planning, map making and scale are some of the many skills and concepts used in a practical situation and a purposeful manner in this suite of programs, which can be used effectively with infants and juniors. If anyone else finds difficulty in giving me directions in future I'll be suggesting a few sessions for them! Worth a place in every primary school's collection.