Teddy Games. (CD for Windows, £49) The initial picture of a colourful room allows you to click in many different places to find a Teddy activity. I started dressing a Teddy by selecting different clothing¾matching or otherwise¾and dragging it across the screen to Teddy. There is a delightful attention to detail: Teddy’s eyes move up quizzically to see what you have put on his head, and each completed activity makes the ‘menu’ teddy animate in a different way as a reward, sometimes clapping, or doing a little dance. There are twelve different activities hidden in different parts of the room. Some will stimulate or motivate children to make something happen: clicking the right place to start an animated sequence, clicking the right door to find out who is behind it. Others are simple matching activities, looking for similarities in two pictures, or finding the odd one out. There are screen versions of common classroom activities¾dominoes with train carriages, sorting coloured objects into boxes¾and a few activities similar to My World, where the user has to complete a picture, build a scene or dress a Teddy. All these games are well-executed and motivating. The pictures are clear and simple. Many of them involve dragging objects with the mouse, but they can be run by one or two switches or a touch screen. Their educational benefits, as with most other software, will depend on the context they are given by the teacher. They provide marvellous opportunities for talk about the colour and size of objects, and describing what happens in a simple series of events. They are constantly surprising in a motivating and reassuring way: a very fine balance which few CD ROMs achieve consistently.

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