School House Rock Thinking Games

Reviewed by Ashley Collins
Published by Creative Wonder

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

PC version requires:
486/66 or higher, 8MB of RAM, 16MB of hard drive space, Windows 98/95/3.1, double-speed CD-ROM or higher, Windows compatible sound card, 256 color monitor

Mac version requires:
68040 processor with 8MB of RAM or PowerPC with 16MB of RAM, 13MB of hard drive space, 7.1 operating system or higher, 2x CD-ROM or higher, 640x480x256 color monitor

Description:

This program features 7 arcade games, Concentration: match the squares (ex. 12-4=3+5 or 8X5=40). Tortoise and the Bear: the tortoise must get his camping equipment while avoiding the bears. Geometron: draw lines connecting dots, and if you complete the shape (square, triangle, etc.), you get a point (we all did these as kids - you draw a grid of dots and see who can make the most squares). Lucky Rocks: blast away falling rocks and spaceships to protect your letters. Lucky's Gallery: figure out which ducks answer the math problem (ex. odd number, less than 25, etc.) and use a slingshot to hit them with an apple. Magic Numbers: a form of tic-tac-toe where you have to line up numbers that add/multiply/etc. up to the magic number. Math Machine: pick numbers to make the equations work, but you can only use each number so many times.

Features:

  • School House Rock
  • 7 different arcade games
  • 7 videos from the different series'
  • Printable worksheets with games and activities
  • Over 40 activities in Lucky's Arcade

Technical Aspects:

No problems during installation or gameplay. However, once you're in the arcade game, you must exit out to watch videos or see the printable worksheets.

Report and Conclusions:

Anyone who has played GrammarRock will recognize the arcade in the image above as being a part of that game. Unfortunately, that's all there is to this one. The two they included from GrammarRock are typical arcade games (similar to Pacman and Space Invaders) that have no educational content. The math arcade games are educational, but a few are quite hard. My 9-year-old cousin found them difficult and the 12 year old found it somewhat boring, but had trouble manipulating the mouse in the shooting gallery game. She knew the answers, but couldn't aim the slingshot well enough to hit the answers (I even had a hard time).

The packaging is a little misleading. I'm not sure where they got the "over 40 activities" from. Even if you add up the number of levels in each game, you only get 30. I guess they're including the 7 videos and 47 different worksheets along with the arcade games (7+7+47=61).

SHR Thinking Games just isn't up to the quality of some of the other School House Rock games. It feels more like a title that was rushed out to capitalize on the success of the previous games. It also now has a deluxe version of it out, with this CD packaged with another containing some of the games from the Grammar, Math, Science, and America Rock games and priced at $34.95.