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(More customer reviews)First of all, my background:
I'm a software developer who also used to work as a math teacher at the middle and high school levels. I have a very bright middle-school-aged daughter who's often bored in her math class, and is starting to show interest in learning some math material on her own, rather than waiting for her slow-as-the-slowest-student "honors" math class. (Yeah, that kind of bright.)
I looked around at various math-teaching computer programs. Math Advantage seemed to be one of the few prominent names in the field, the brand new 2006 edition was just coming out, and the price seemed pretty good considered how much material it covered, so I decided to give it a shot.
Oops.
First annoying aspect: the "ten core subject areas" come on ten separate CDs. Each CD contains its own separate program that must be individually installed. Why? Didn't it occur to anyone at Encore that they could write one program with a different data disc for each subject, so we could install the one program and switch between data discs as needed? (That's how every multi-disc game program I've seen works.) Or just load the whole lot onto a single DVD?
Okay, so I grumble a bit and install 10 CDs. Well, nine. I got tired after nine. The tenth one can wait. So I now have what appear to be seven core math programs and two "bonus" programs crowding my Start menu, with one "bonus" program left to install later.
The seven core programs are Pre-Algebra, Algebra 1, Algebra 2, Geometry, Trigonometry, Pre-Calculus & Calculus, and Statistics. Sounds like a pretty thorough line-up. So, I start the Pre-Algebra program. My screen goes black, and I get a dialog box informing me that I need to "Please check that 'Math Advantage 2003 Pre Algebra CD' is in your CD-ROM drive.'" (The "2003" on the message causes me to wonder how much of this 2006 program is a mere re-copy of the 2003 version.) After some puttering, I determine that to run the program, I have to insert the appropriate CD, exit the installer dialog when it appears, and *then* run the program from the Start menu. Ridiculous.
The graphics are cheap, and only use a small fraction of a mere 800x600 screen (further suggesting an older design), but okay, it runs. The opening menu is initially confusing - a big wheel sporting prominent-but-unclickable icons with clickable text labels - but provides entry to "Tutorial", "Examination", "Game", "Report Card", and a few other things.
The Tutorial interface is dry, and the audio voice reads the displayed text and questions (presumably in case your math-hungry student is illiterate). Same for the Exam; functional, but very dull. The Game is a very simplistic steer-the-spark-on-the-wires game that could have been played on an older cell phone, hardly worthy of a remotely modern computer, and seemed to have very little to do with any math concepts. The Interactive Zone has various lessons within, many extremely simple and dull, and some that were just simple lectures with simple graphics, but none involved much interactivity.
I ran several of the other discs (Geometry, Trigonometry, etc.) and found very much the same comments -- and, in fact, the exact same cheap graphics and dull style -- applied to all of 'em.
In the end, this felt like one of those cheap math workbooks you find at a discount educational materials store had been pasted onto my computer screen with a soft voice to read everything to me. If you consider that each such workbook might cost about $4, and there are ten of 'em in here, then the price might seem about right. But somehow, I expected a *lot* more out of a $40 math education computer software package that was supposedly constructed for 2006. What I got appears to be a re-repackaged software that's *at least* a few years old, not at all well designed to hold the attention of young math students, nor any more effective at teaching them math skills than any cheap and simple math workbook.
Overall, I am extremely disappointed. The programs work (after some effort), and they do seem to include a reasonable degree of material (math lessons and problems and such), but the presentation is uniformly and mindlessly dull, and there is nothing to spark or grab the interest of the average young math student -- even if they weren't already jaded by the plethora of infinitely snazzier computer games and other software packages common today.
There's also a strange bug related to its use of computer memory, which other reviewers of this and past editions (yep, it's apparently been in there for years) have described well.
By the way, I never did install that tenth disc. And I'm uninstalling the nine now...
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