It is no surprise to everyone that programs aimed at children represent a growing part of the software market. After the success of smaller companies such as Humongous Entertainment, who successfully produced amazing games based on original characters (Putt-Putt, Fatty Bear, etc..), the long since established corporations such as IBM started to follow this attracting trail.
The Book of Shadowboxes is the first title to be released by IBM made for children from three to eight years of age. Based on the book written and illustrated by Laura Seeley, the computer version brings the original characters to life on your screen. Shadow is a three-dimensional character, who is the host of the show, and indicates to the children their possible selections.
Basically, the program is divided into five parts with different activities in each section. The first part lets Shadow read the book of poems which includes 26 seperate texts with each of them related to a specific letter of the alphabet. Each poem uses a maximum of words using the specific letter and they are represented in the shadowboxes.
Following the first part are two activities where children have to find object/word associations. The first activity, children or Shadow read the poems and have to find objects from the poem that begin with that letter. The second activity lets children pick their favorite letter with which they are going to play with.
The Treasure Hunt activity is nearly the same as the two mentionned above with the difference that they have to find objects not mentionned in the poems.
Finally, the Shadowboxes activity will exercice children's creativity by letting them design their own shadowboxe with paint and coloring tools, and illustrations. The Book of Shadowboxes is really easy to use with simplified menus and clear explanations. The illustrations are lovely with touching characters that will delight both children and their parents.
The Book of Shadowboxes features all the magic of a book with the best of multimedia.
486 SX-25 MHz or better,
Min 4 MB memory,
MS-DOS 5.0 or later, Windows 3.1 or later,
Hard drive required,
Double speed CD-ROM drive or faster,
SVGA 256 color graphic card and monitor,
Microsoft Mouse or 100% compatible,
Windows 3.1 compatible sound card.
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