Wordbuilder

Let’s stay with home-made products. You realize that toddlers stare at a computer screen all day. Great, isn’t it? They give you peace and don’t weigh you down. But you are feeling guilt, saying, I neglect them, I do not educate them, and so on. Wordbuilder seems like a miracle solution. The toddlers will continue to stare at the screen and you will maintain your peace and quiet while they are being educated. The recipe, of course, is not a discovery of the local publishers, so the whole western world is already buying indulgences.

The youngest ones are well taken care of, as the female voice diligently and promptly reads all the instructions displayed on the screen, so that our illiterate toddlers cannot find themselves embarrassed. Ah, that voice! For the voices own good, I have to say that it is distinct and articulate, the nuances of pronunciation come to the fore nicely. On the other hand, how sweet, routine, is it, as if it has been reading radio fairy tales at seven for at least a century, or whenever they were put on the program? Hey, do they still have them?

The program is divided into five parts. Twenty-five pictures are waiting for you in the wordbuilder. You click on the painted car and the image enlarges, the voice says “C” and you see the letter at the bottom of the screen. Voices are waiting for you with four pictures and a letter drawn. You must click on images whose content begins with this letter. For Connections, you must connect between the drawn objects those whose name ends with the same sound, with those whose name begins with that voice. So a cow. A car, for example. The stories are short, three or four sentences. The sentences describe the relationship between the objects and the person in the picture, say, “Meta is sitting at a table. She has a ruler in her hand.” Instead of the words table and ruler, there is an empty space, and the drawings of these objects are placed above the story. You need to drag the images to the right places. Words are bookmakers in the strictest sense. A drawing of the object is waiting on the screen, and images with signed letters are arranged around it. Drag the images to the right places to compose the name of the central object.

Let me say it clearly and loudly: considering the price (4998 tolars) and the content, I think the product is worth buying. It is a pity that there is not more competition. Thus, the children will experience a real shock when they hear the Slovenian voice from the screen. And yet, nobody should think that by buying one record, he could get rid of teaching children forever. There is no information on the number of included tasks anywhere on the cover, but they start to repeat very quickly.

The instructions promise the child that he would solve a “certain number” of puzzle tasks. I started solving tasks. And solve. And solve. I learned all the letters, completed all the stories, composed the words. My rewards were still nowhere to be found. Then, as I connected the words, my hand stopped at the word heart. It ends with a T, and I only had Peanuts, Spruce, Needle and Bus available for the connection. I also connected that, and the program just laughed at me and blew me as a fool. I haven’t seen such a puzzle, but I imagined a crowd of parents who don’t have to explain the basics of letter recognition to their children, that now have to introduce them to the wonderful world of programming bugs.