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.

Copyright © 1995 Rich Cunningham for infoMedia. All rights reserved worldwide.