Chris Davis welcomes a creative learning program for young children.

Can there be anybody left who hasn’t seen the ubiquitous My World suite of simple but superb software for the early years? Just in case there is, the basic idea is to give the child control of sprites (small pictures, bits of pictures, letters and other objects) which they can move around the screen, placing them wherever they wish.

Each My World disc has a theme, perhaps with a puzzle to solve, a jigsaw to complete, a weather map to create or a teddy to dress. Unlike many programs, with My World there is no self-correction or even automatic checking. If the child places objects wrongly, then they stay placed wrongly. Some teachers might not appreciate the true value of this, but it is more directly related to the real world, where things rarely get put right automatically.

My World 2+2 is a repackaging of a selection from this series on four discs. Disc 1 is entitled Early Learning and includes 12 activities for the youngest users. “Alphabet” presents all 26 letters on the screen. Clicking on any letter will take the child to a picture of an object with that initial but it will be disassembled in some way. The child has the fun of reassembling the pictures while learning their initial letter sounds.

“Blocks” allows the child to build on screen in ways which would be impossible with real blocks. There are three master blocks which can be selected and dropped on to the main screen wherever you choose. The challenge is to build given objects or match a given pattern. “Bricks” is the same but uses cubes and cuboids which can be flipped, rotated or inverted, multiplying the possibilities considerably.

“Car” needs the child to be able to identify the component parts of a vintage sports car and then put them together, while “Goldilocks” offers a set of screens with which a storyteller can illustrate the Three Bears story as they tell it.

“Letters” must be the world’s simplest word processor. The letters have to be picked up from the set at the bottom of the screen and dropped on to the lines, where they snap tidily into place. “Sentence” takes this a stage further, introducing the jumbled words game. The first disc is completed by Teddy, a computerised version of the cardboard doll dressing game.

Disc 2, called Design, has four main screens. The first enables the design of Christmas gift tags, using a whole stocking-full of appropriate images and phrases. The next offers an isometric view of an empty room and a selection of doors, windows and kitchen fixtures and fittings, which can be popped into place for your dream kitchen. “KitchPlan” offers the same opportunities in plan view a valuable lesson in the conceptualisation of early mapping skills. Most salesman now seem to have an advanced version of these programs on their laptop when they try to encourage you to take out your second mortgage. Finally, on this disc, “Tess” is a straightforward 12x12 grid with coloured squares and triangles for tessellating patterns.

Disc 3 is all about Dinosaurs. Pictures of about 25 dinosaurs are supplied in various forms. Models can be printed and constructed, fact sheets compiled, timelines arranged, prehistoric scenes created, and even a skeleton built up from its constituent bones.

Finally, Disc 4 assembles a variety of odd screens under the title All Sorts. “4x4” is a screen version of the Connect Four game, while “Draughts” and “Solitaire” are just what they say they are. “Dessin” mixes French text and sets of drawings. The child has to create the picture described in the text, thus proving their interpretive skills. All the standard symbols of circuit drawings and wiring diagrams are provided with “Electric”, but this is not a “live” program and no lights will flash or bells ring if the circuit is correctly connected.

Embryonic town planners will enjoy “MakeATown”, with which roads, buildings, street furniture and trees can be conurbated into new cities. “Tiles” is a much more exciting and varied tessellation screen, while “Timetable” allows language students to build up their week’s pattern, on to a matrix of a standard week, in either French, German or Spanish words or using subject symbols. Young meteorologists can dream up forecasts using a TV-style weather map and collect a record of the week on the weather chart.

Finally, and perhaps most excitingly of all, “Basis” does absolutely nothing. This is the authoring tool, through which the teacher or child can design and create new My World screens of their own. The second half of the manual is dedicated to telling you how to go about this and it really is quite easy, especially if you have a ready supply of Draw file clip-art to hand.

Individual My World 2 packs are also available, notably Kitchen Planner, as described above, and the similar Room Planner, which completes the house, providing all the bits and bobs needed for bedroom, lounge and dining room design.

Next you can move outside and set about The Garden. This is a comprehensive set of screen activities, including garden layout, weather recording, a simple plant catalogue database, food chains and Venn diagrams for the sorting, setting and sequencing of garden creatures. Other titles include, Awards and Rewards, which creates certificates, tickets, invitations and the like; Pentangs, a collection of tangrams and pentominoes, Christmas Ideas and Computer Aided Design.

The My World concept is, like many of the most successful primary computer programs, very simple. The skill lies in a teacher’s ability to utilise the learning opportunities which the various screens afford. Young children delight in being in control of the screen images and are subliminally picking up the vital message that they control the computer, not vice versa.

Northwest Semerc stands - SN12a, SN13