Dr. Seuss Kindergarten
Broderbund	Ages 4 to 6

Rating Scale 5 = great,    1 = poor

Educational Value 4.0

Kid Appeal 4.8

Ease of Use 5.0

System Requirements

PC / Mac Price Survey

Product Support

Kids who like Dr. Seuss stories, with their clever rhymes and outrageous characters, will enjoy this well-polished kindergarten program. As the fully animated story-line opens, the ever-friendly Cat in the Hat greets the user and introduces our hero, young Gerald McGrew, an enterprising fellow who has built a new zoo. For Gerald, however, no ordinary animals will do. He seeks the wildest, the strangest, and, of course, the most euphonically named of creatures.

Naturally, bizarre beasts abound in Seussville, but Gerald needs help from the user to convince them to join his menagerie. So he boards his ‘McGrew Zoo Choo Choo’ train and sets off on his quest. Eight venues await, each featuring familiar Seuss personalities, from Star-Bellied Sneetches to the Lorax and his Barbaloots.

Life in Seussville holds the usual distractions and difficulties, and in order to persuade the animals to join him, Gerald must promise to help them fix their messes and solve their problems. So, for example, while visiting the Bippo No Bungus family, alphabet sequencing is used to identify the 26 children, at Bubble Tub Creek phonics and spelling success helps patch the Crew’s leaky tubs, and addition and subtraction skills aid the Barbaloots in their truffula fruit harvest. With each completed activity Gerald gets another animal for his zoo, and as animals appear in the zoo, they become clickables, each performing his or her own amusing antics.

Educational Value

Each of the eight activities includes three levels of difficulty and focuses on an essential kindergarten skill or group of skills. The program covers the following general categories: alphabet sequencing and reading readiness, phonics and spelling, sentence building, classifying, logic, pattern recognition, counting, shapes and patterns, memory skills, measurement, estimation, addition, subtraction and counting. In some instances the task itself helps illustrate the concept being learned or drilled. For example, in Barbaloot Math, the user must help the Barbaloots pick truffula fruits from their trees. As each fruit is picked it is placed in a cart. When two carts are filled appropriately with fruit, an addition or subtraction problem appears on the screen. The user counts as the fruit from cart 1 and the fruit from cart 2 are moved to cart 3 where the new number becomes the solution to the equation. This demystifies the addition (or subtraction) process, making it concrete and therefore more easily understood.

A progress report can be accessed for each user of the program. This section lists the skills covered, the number of lessons completed for each skill, and the percent answered correctly. SuperKids testers mentioned that they would have liked to have this section directly linked to an activity, so that after checking on their children’s progress they could more easily advance to uncompleted lessons. They also noted that the percent correct for the concentration-like game (Smuv Glove Matching) was misleading, as no one instantly achieves a perfect score in that type activity.

Kid Appeal

Dr. Seuss Kindergarten includes an amusing array of quirky characters, nicely detailed animation, and an unique pastel color scheme that was repeatedly complimented by our reviewers. Although approval varied amongst the program’s activities (a few were a bit tedious), most were well-received by our younger testers. The favorites were fruit-picking with the Barbaloots and rhyme-making with the Zinazoo Bird and his band members. In this activity, Zinazoo (who lives in Figwig the Moose’s antlers) says a word, and his band members each suggest, in picture form, a rhyming word. The user must choose the correct rhyme. After two such trials, the band writes and sings a song, incorporating these two rhymes. Each of the band members makes a bee-bop type musical instrument sound and the result is charming. "My son was convinced that his collaboration was instrumental in the creation of the song," said one mother, "He was amazed!"

Ease of Use / Install

The program installed without a problem on Windows 95. Navigation is simple and straightforward, no guide is required.

Best for... / Bottom-Line

For those who like Dr. Seuss and his crazy creations, this program is a definite winner.

See SuperKids' comparisons with other kindergarten software titles, and the Buyers Guide for current market prices of the PC and Mac versions.

PC: Windows 3.1 or Windows 95, 66MHz 486DX or faster cpu, 20 MB hard drive space, 8 MB RAM for Windows 3.1 (16 MB recommended), 16 MB RAM for Windows 95, 640 x 480 display, 256 colors: High and True Color supported for Windows 95, Double-speed or faster CD-ROM, Windows compatible sound device

Mac: System 7.1 or higher, 68040/20 or faster cpu, 20 MB hard drive space, 8 MB free RAM, 640 x 480 display with 256 colors, 2X or faster CD-ROM

Reviewed on:

PowerMac 6400/200 with 32MB and 8XCD

Pentium166 with 24MB and 12XCD

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