BARNEY BEAR  Goes To School Review by Trevor Jones  ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| BIO: Amiga A500; one external drive, 1meg., 1084S mon. Starcursor joystick and Agiler mouse. Family ; One wife and four children under six. Interests ; Graphics, animation, authoring programs and (of course) "educational" software for children under six. THE PROGRAM. Barney Bear goes to school is aimed at ages three to eight. It is released through Free Spirit Software and created by Dave Krohne with graphics by Stephen Beam. It comes on two normal AmigaDos disks so the first thing to do is make working copies and put the originals in a safe place away from the kids. During the startup a requester window appears with no instructions (nor is it explained in the otherwise comprehensive manual). The words ENGLISH and GERMAN are displayed in white boxes side by side. If you click on one of these the program then loads in the chosen language. So if you're learning German Barney Bear could help! Interestingly, hidden on the disk is a full screen requester picture that appears to have been disabled for the international release because, I believe, the USA flag is used for the English option. To see it (1/4 size) refer to Figure 1 on the BarneyBear.Pic with this review. Next a fanfare is heard followed by a spoken introduction over the Title picture (see Figure 2 on the BarneyBear.Pic). The tune School Days is played and the credits screen displayed. Curiously a spoken instruction asks you to press the left mouse button to go to the story or the right button to go to the school room. It would have been standard practice to have presented a requester with two buttons to click on. The spoken request is not repeated and in any case it makes it rather difficult for deaf children to use. The story takes the child through a number of screens with spoken commentary and different tasks to complete. For example in the first screen (see Figure 3) you must wake Barney up by tapping him on the shoulder. However as with the other screens, other things are active on the screen if clicked on. Clicking on the toy box informs your child that Barney picks up his toys everyday and likes to keep his room tidy. Other lessons during the story include nutrition, colour selection and road saf ety. Finally Barney arrives at the class room where you would jump to if you didn't select the story. Various items within the school room are active and the school room is actually a menu from which to select different activities. My children had fun just clicking on things to see what they do. Some are just sound effects or short stories while others give a short demonstration such as on shapes or letters. Yet others involve interactive activities in spelling, colours and numbers. A small colouring program can also be activated from the school room. It has a fixed palette of 16 colours and there are 16 different pictures to colour in. It is the click and colour fill style with the palette displayed to the right of the picture and the control buttons across the bottom. Arrows allow you to scroll through the 16 pictures while a blank square button will clear the picture. Another square with 4 smaller coloured squares within it turns colour cycleing on and off. Stop quits the colouring program back to the school room. Unfortunately there is no print option so no pictures once coloured (or uncoloured for colouring in on paper) can be saved as hard copy. Also a completed picture is lost by being wiped when you move to another one. Being normal AmigaDos, Barney Bear Goes To School can probably be hard disk installed although I haven't tested this. I have tested under Workbench 2.04 and it runs OK. To quit the program by clicking the right mouse button while at the school room and then clicking YES in the quit picture (see Figure 4 in BarneyBear.Pic) probably makes more sense on a Hard Drive since on a floppy system this only results in the screen turning black. USER INPUT. Unlike many games Barney Bear is AmigaDos but even more unusual it uses standard IFF pictures for the display screens. This means it is possible to load them into a paint program such as Deluxe Paint and modify them. Then save them back to (your backup) disk. I have made the school name that of my sons' and put my children's names on the blackboard. It's up to your own imagination though remember that parts of the screen will be active so the thing that's there needs to be in that part of the screen. Also as Barney Bear is a NTSC display set your DeluxePaint with NTSC option on. CRITICISM. The display is NTSC and so does not use the full PAL screen. The road rules are for driving on the wrong side of the road. The ENGLISH/GERMAN requester is non standard even though I found a requester picture while using DirectoryOpus titled Flags.Pic which is not used. CONCLUSION. The suggested retail price is about $34.95 but I picked up my copy at the Amiga show at Darling Harbour in 1991 for $25. This price is good value for your first Barney Bear however there are 4 more in the series and I wouldn't pay any more than $10 -$15 for the other programs. So I'm still waiting for that bargain (maybe this year at Darling Harbour?). The program is recommended for 3 to 8 years old however it is certainly very suitable for the 4 to 6 year range. By providing a short story, cute graphics, interactive games and different activities Barney Bear provides a fun learning environment for children that can keep their attention and interest for far longer than many "educational" software I have tried. My two eldest children found it easy and fun to use. I found it fun to customise the pictures. Barney Bear Goes To School is recommended.  ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 |||