Description:
Arthur, Francine, Baby Kate, and a host of other familiar faces are on hand to give children a guided tour of the preschool curriculum in Arthur's Preschool. This educational game is designed to give early learners some practice in basic concepts such as counting, shape recognition, the alphabet, and more. By helping Arthur's friends in these drills, players create pictures, build robots, and complete half-built puppets, just to name a few. Children who don't mind straight-up education drills are the definite target of this game, aimed at the 3 to 5 years age range. Arthur's Preschool places a heavy emphasis on learning over play. The various activities--whether identifying letters by the sounds they make, choosing a particular shape in response to a verbal cue, or doing simple counting--offer, essentially, an electronic version of old-style educational flash cards. Each activity is designed to maximize learning and has a built-in scale of escalating difficulty. They will challenge users to harder tasks if they ace the first level of toughness. For players who want their learning activities sugar-coated with a little arcade play or humor, Arthur's Preschool is certain to feel a little dry. This is not a flaw, though, so much as a difference in approach. The game provides learning statistics for parental review and offers one "achievement certificate," complete with a connect-the-dots game, for each academic subject. The game also offers a series of creativity-oriented games--arts, crafts, and musical activities--in addition to its more hard-core subjects. With so many games and activities, it is safe to say this game is genuinely trying to pack everything but a teacher and school friends into its school-in-a-box. Arthur's Preschool takes itself seriously, true, but children who take it seriously, too, are sure to learn a great deal. --Alyx Dellamonica
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