The Encyclopedia of Nature

LIONS AND TIGERS AND FROGS....OH MY

A Review of The Encyclopedia of Nature

When I was in school (more years ago than I care to remember), I was always fascinated by the intricate drawing of animals in the nature books in the libraries. The colors and hand drawings seemed to be more attractive than photographs that appeared in magazines. The product reviewed here reminded me of those nature books that I enjoyed as a child, and I found the joy still there.

This product, "Encyclopedia of Nature", is an extremely easy to use and understand program that allows a child to experience the natural world, and learn about it in a way that is very subtle. The opening title and introduction is very-Myst like in its presentation. You go from the opening title to a building that looks like it was designed the same architect who did the library in the game MYST. You are then show a desk where you begin your journey. One thing both my son and I enjoyed was the variety of ways that you could explore the different areas. The desk is divided up into several areas that you use to start your journey. There are drawers with different groups of life (amphibians, plants and fungi, reptiles, birds, etc.) which opens to reveal aspects of its contents. There are posters on the wall for mammals and fish, a shell for prehistoric life (yup, dinosaurs, to quote my son), and a weather device of some sort to explore the effects of climate. There are two reference books, and a quiz master to gauge how much the user has retained. There is even a microscope to explore the microworld. An index is cleverly hung on the wall, below a switch that can control how you access drawers. There is an excellent on-line help section that is activated by pushing a "?" on the wall.

There is excellent use of multimedia techniques throughout the program. There are live video sequences ( I didn't count them all, but there appear to be about 40) that supplement the particular area being explored. There is a liberal use of audio. For example when you first open a page with writing on it, it will most likely be heard as well as seen. This was a big help to my 8 year old son and 10 year old daughter, as some of the words were hard to pronounce. There is an HTML-style of structure used in the text, where clicking on a highlighted word will take you to a discussion or meaning of that word. This allows a user to follow a train of thought through to their conclusion. One item I found very interesting to use was in the way the program shows how some of the animals worked (biologically speaking). For example, in the "What is a Fish" section of the Fish poster, you click on Fish anatomy, and you get a sound and slide show of how a fish works, and it does it by removing the outer scales of the fish and shows you its insides, and then describes how they work. Kind of like biology class, with out the mess. The use of multimedia in this product is top notch.

The program ran just fine on a 486-66 VLB with 2x CD ROM and 16MB of memory. It also ran fine on a 486-33 ISA bus with 8MB of memory and 1x CD ROM. However, with the 1x CD Rom, do not use the magnify function for full motion video. On my system, it caused the dropping of both audio bites and video frames. They ran fine in the normal sized mode with no problems. I only had one thing about the program that I didn't like and it involved the audio support once you got below a main topic. It only announced what that topic was, and did not read it to you. On main topics, it would read the entire page for you. I suspect that the disk is pretty full, and there just wasn't room for them. I also had a problem getting through to the company to find some information about the program. They do have an 800 #, but it goes to a message system where they ask you to leave your name and number and they will call you back. It would have been nice to have spoken to a warm body.

I would recommend this program to anyone without hesitation. It is a very powerful learning tool with an excellent user interface. It contains very good subject matter and should make any child's learning experience with this program a very pleasant one.