I Love Math

Reviewed by Dave Twede
Published by DK Interactive Learning

Age Group: Age 4 to 8, Age 8 and Up
Type: Math
Price: $20

Description:

I Love Math is Carmen Sandiego meets kiddie Terminators. DK has produced a creative and stimulating math adventure for children aged 7-11, and it's one of their five best selling titles (end of 1999). Children are on a mission to save the world from Gretchen and Wilbur, a devilish duo that would destroy the world's basis of mathematics. Gretchen hates math, so much that even the word Math puts her full tilt into a tantrum. Players must travel back with them in Old Bark's (the narrator dog) time machine to the ancient civilizations of Greece, Atlantis, Egypt and Aztec. Each location has different problem types in order to put world-math order in its proper place.

Features:

  • Save the World Mode
  • Free Travel Play
  • Practice-Choose Challenge mode
  • Options include: time limits on/off, Joke key on/off, accelerate through topics on/off, animation on/off
  • Four Math Skill Levels for each mode
  • Printable Certificates for real achievements

Technical Aspects:

I ran I Love Math on a P300, win95 with 32MB RAM and a 36x CDROM. The Graphics and Sound were superb. Old Bark, the narrator, explained the game fairly well, and animations ran fairly smooth,although my 36x CDROM still spun up and down throughout the game, causing some delays. The first time I installed, it crashed on me over and over. I removed it and reinstalled, and afterward, had no more crashes.

Report and Conclusions:

Let's face it, like Gretchen, few kids like math. Wilbur would be the rest of us, who agree not to like math because no one hangs with a math dweeb. I admit it, I'm a dweeb. I aced math and went on to grad school doing a lot of advanced math. As entertaining as I Love Math is, the most important aspect is that it really teaches math thinking, not just memorization of mathematical relations and equations. For example, in the Aztec world, where Gretchen has locked up the birds of paradise (a bit of history is thrown into each world), players use geometry matching, spatial reasoning and a bit of tooling to build keys (geometric shapes) to unlock the four birds. The highest level had questions about isosceles, line symmetry and asymmetry - stuff few parents learned or remember learning. There is a clue button for whenever the child gets stuck, and it helps explain the meaning of words like isosceles. In Atlantis, the water has been drained and players use fractions (combinations of up to 1/12th) to build pipe works for refilling the city. King Khufu locks players inside a pyramid burial ground and taunts them with story problems (some with tidbits of Egyptology in them). Each right answer breaks a brick and puts them closer to escaping. In Greece, players must rank measurements of length, area, time, weight, and money into Gold, Silver and Bronze awards. This world is particularly good at emphasizing on how to setup story problems of measurement by stressing (three times) the kind of measurement you're handling.

There are also occasional repairs to the time machine circuits and other problems that must be fixed in order to continue after Gretchen and Wilbur. The ending is satisfying once you have wrestled the duo back to our time and fixed the math problems of history.

My concerns would be that I Love Math isn't all that long. I finished the Save the World mode in less than half an hour, playing a mixture of the skill levels. Each world was too short, in my opinion, with between eight to twenty problems to complete. Should you buy I Love Math? I would say yes, especially if you can get it on sale. Why? Because it offers DK's mode of teaching how to learn, rather than the usual drilling over and over the same kinds of memorization problems.




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