Customer Reviews

Disney's Phonics Quest

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

We just got back from Disneyworld so my daughter was very eager to play this new "game."

She is still playing it, but keeps asking: "where's Mickey?" The idea is that Mickey travels around trying to retrieve stuff missing from the castle. Each missing item can only be recovered after completing a lengthy phonics drill. During most of the drills Mickey and the recognizable Disney characters are off-screen. And you have to correctly answer a large number of questions before you get a prize. The cute animated graphics only briefly disguise the fact that these are pretty routine exercises.

The software worked very well on our old PC (AMD 500 Mhz, no graphics card). No problems installing or delays in loading etc...

The software automatically adjusts the difficulty level based on the accuracy of the responses. This should allow the software to be used for a long time as a child's skills improve.

The software comes with a microphone and voice recognition software. Unfortunately you have to "train" the voice recognition software to understand a user's speech patterns by reading lengthy texts into the microphone. Do you see the problem here? If my daughter could read those texts then we wouldn't be buying this CD... I can read the texts, but my voice is quite different from my daughters. The end result was that when a "voice recognition" opportunity appeared during the game my daughter would shout answers into the microphone and get no response.

My daughter is 4 and loves all things Disney. This game has a lot to offer and in the beginning she was very gung-ho about playing. But at this age, there needs to be rewards rather frequently to maintain their interest. In Phonics Quest, there are plenty of choices for her to choose from-which is great. And many of the games are quite educational. There is a game for sorting and listening skills. One for ryhming words. Another for patterns. There is simple spelling-fill in the missing letter, and so on. The problem with it is that the kids have to work for a long time to get each prize-the missing items from the castle for which Mickey is on a quest. By a long time, I mean that they have to answer about 20 or more problems in each of the 6 rounds. Then, there are 6 prizes in all to get. Now, after all of this hard work, one would expect a little fanfare for the kids to make it worth fighting for. But the fan fare is almost non existent and then just rushes you off to do it again. I find its the fan fare that keeps them coming back for more. Jaclynn has stopped coming back for more after about 4 rounds and dubbed the game boring.

In a word, disappointing. We purchased this game thinking it was representative of Disney interactive products. At first, our five year old son enjoyed playing it but quickly bored of it. Kids have to repeat the phonics exercises over and over and over again - sometimes more than 10 times - to receive any kind of fan-fare or reward in retrieving the Sorcerer's lost items. Excellent graphics and great activities but there certainly should be more verbal or graphic reward as incentives to make the child want to further pursue the game. Kids of this age react much better to more frequent reward...and this game just disappoints for computer active, advanced children. Other Disney products have been better received.

we have been very pleased with this program. As others have stated, it can be repetitive for adults, but my 3 year old will play Phonics Quest for as long as you let her. She thinks that it is hilarious that the "items", once collected, fly back out the door again, making her play more. While I am certain that the amount of reading that her father and I have done with her has helped her in learning to read, I honestly feel like Phonics Quest has advanced her reading further than she would have otherwise been. I feel I must address another reviewer's complaint that her 4 year old was able to guess the correct answer based on the first letter and the picture. My child figured this out as well, but the game "caught on", and started only supplying her with words that started with the same letter as the picture. All in all, I have been pleased with this game and would recommend it to a friend.

I bought this title yesterday. My 4 year old son loved the graphics and the games, but - as others have said before me - they go on for wayyyy to long. He was answering them correctly, but more questions just kept coming. He lost patience after the 10th question in a row, and moved on to another activity only to find the same thing.
As a parent, I was disappointed in the "phonics" of the program. I am teaching my son to read at home, and he is sounding out words very well. This program doesn't teach you how to sounds out words, it just asked you to identify the words with the pictures. For example, my son would see the word TABLE and just sounds the first letter and guess that the picture of the table went with the word. Now, he was correct, but this didn't really teach him anything but how to be a good guesser. Even if he liked this program, I would not want him to use it because it doesn't teach him the "phonics" building blocks to really be a good reader.