"Wasn't it any good?" I asked the sour-faced child who'd just tried out this software. "It was pants, boring and it didn't make sense" she retorted. She was not wrong. This package has so many errors, sections of it are all but impossible for its target age group (7-11). It is divided into Lessons, Testing and Administration (a passworded area for the adult to view the child's progress).
Lessons
These are co-hosted by a comedic skeleton called Seemore Skinless whose speech is modelled on Woody the cowboy doll in "Toy Story". Some children might find him amusing; more sophisticated or older children might well find him irritating.
A female voice-over describes the concepts - apostrophe use, homophones, spelling strategies, etc. - with accompanying visuals and drag-and-drop exercises. This is done very, very slowly. There is a play/pause button which actually functions as a play/stop button, so if you hit it and then restart it, you have to listen to her explanation from the very beginning. Sometimes the point of the exercise is so obvious, her introduction is entirely unnecessary, but she cannot be stopped in order for you to get on with the exercise; you HAVE TO listen to the whole spiel.
Testing
You can select which sections of English you want to be tested on out of Spelling, Vocabulary, Phonics, Punctuation, Grammar, Fiction and Non-fiction texts. There is then a mix of test styles (mimicking those in the real SATs) - words that are read to you for you to spell correctly, matching words with their antonyms, contractions or meaning, and true/false questions. There is instant marking - as soon as you've completed a question you are shown the correct answers. This isn't always done very clearly, so you have to check carefully that your answers on the left agree with the correct ones displayed on the right. At the end of the test you are told your score. The tests are quite repetitive - we took 13 and saw several questions repeated 4 or 5 times, usually the most basic ones at that.
Unforgivably, some of the punctuation exercises are complete gibberish. I include, verbatim, the text plus "answers" from one of these, taken from "Great Expectations". You are challenged to provide the correct punctuation in the empty boxes [ ]. When you see the answer, the boxes have been "filled in". Unfortunately, the sentences make no more sense now than when the boxes were empty.
"This," said Mr Pumplechook, "is [.]
"This is Pip, is it?" returned the young [,] who was very pretty and seemed very proud. "Come in, [.] Mr Pumplechook was coming in also, when she stopped him with the gate. [!] she said. "Did you wish to see Miss [?]
Several of the punctuation exercises and some of the fiction/non-fiction texts are similarly unusable. There are other coding errors in the main text too, also, "cliche" is repeatedly misspelled.
Administration
Here you can see how your child is doing in the tests. All well and good (don't expect them to get great scores in the punctuation sections!), but it would be more useful if you could determine a level for your child to work within. As it covers everything from the end of KS1 to the SATs at KS2, the bright 11-year-old will take endless tests that ask her to choose the opposite of happy, the opposite of hot, choose which of these words is plural so on and so forth - hence "pants and boring".
Don't get this: get a decent SATs book instead and work through it with your children. They won't thank you for this piece of software.
