Arthur's Preschool

Other products by The Learning Company

Product Features

• This 2-CD set features great games & activities that make learning fun
• Play fun games in the sandbox & create your own puppet show
• A grand total of 9 exciting projects with 60 total activities
• Practice letters and numbers, shapes and colors, matching, music and more!
• Ages 3-5

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00005MKSN
• Item model number: 380901
• Date first available at Amazon.com: May 6, 2006
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #4,794 in Software (See Bestsellers in Software)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #39 in	Software > Macintosh > Children's Software > Grade Specific
  #50 in	Software > Macintosh > Children's Software > Early Learning
  #99 in	Software > Children's Software > Age Ranges > 3 & 4 Years

• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Review
Arthur, Francine, Baby Kate, and a host of other familiar faces are on hand to give children a guided tour of the preschool curriculum in Arthur's Preschool. This educational game is designed to give early learners some practice in basic concepts such as counting, shape recognition, the alphabet, and more. By helping Arthur's friends in these drills, players create pictures, build robots, and complete half-built puppets, just to name a few.

Children who don't mind straight-up education drills are the definite target of this game, aimed at the 3 to 5 years age range. Arthur's Preschool places a heavy emphasis on learning over play. The various activities--whether identifying letters by the sounds they make, choosing a particular shape in response to a verbal cue, or doing simple counting--offer, essentially, an electronic version of old-style educational flash cards. Each activity is designed to maximize learning and has a built-in scale of escalating difficulty. They will challenge users to harder tasks if they ace the first level of toughness.

For players who want their learning activities sugar-coated with a little arcade play or humor, Arthur's Preschool is certain to feel a little dry. This is not a flaw, though, so much as a difference in approach. The game provides learning statistics for parental review and offers one "achievement certificate," complete with a connect-the-dots game, for each academic subject. The game also offers a series of creativity-oriented games--arts, crafts, and musical activities--in addition to its more hard-core subjects.

With so many games and activities, it is safe to say this game is genuinely trying to pack everything but a teacher and school friends into its school-in-a-box. Arthur's Preschool takes itself seriously, true, but children who take it seriously, too, are sure to learn a great deal. --Alyx Dellamonica

Product Description
Arthur's Preschool helps your child build the skills required to start their education off right!

See all Product Description

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great learning adventure!, September 3, 2001

By	Lara Norton "donnorton" (Soperton, Georgia United States) - See all my reviews

My four year old will sit for hours at the computer with Aurthur. It is very easy for her to change activites and print items. I am very pleased with Aurthur's preschool and would recommend it to all.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Windows Incompatability Problem-Very Dissappointed!!!, July 4, 2002

By	Maria Lynch (New Jersey United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This CD-Rom is not compatable with Windows XP and it should be stated clearly somewhere on the packaging. The whole thing froze my computer. Extremely dissappointing!

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Good games, marred by bad implementation, December 28, 2001

By	Vimal S. Rajamanur - See all my reviews

My son has been using this for the last two months. He's 2 & 8 months, slightly under the recommended age for it.

As a game, it should have a lot going for it. For a new user, there are a variety of skills tested, from counting (using baseball), to alphabet (using a robot builder), to shape sorting (using piggy banks of different sizes & coins to match).

However, it is quite flawed in many ways. In most games, the instructions on what letter to select, will stop abruptly if a key is pressed or the mouse is clicked.

For example, in the alphabet game, Arthur will say something like, "Hand Brain the upper case letter A", & there are 5 choices. If however, my son happens to click anywhere on the screen, Arthur will stop before the sentence completes & my son will click at random. It's tough to pick a letter if Arthur doesn't say which one is to be picked!
That sort of thing happens in many of the games, so for us, quite a few of them are un-playable.

If you play the games more than a few times, there's not much variety in the games. The almost exact same things happen each time, even if they were completed correctly the last time.

Quite soon, I'm not sure if my son is learning new stuff or simply remembering the game's prompts from previous experience.

Bottom line : Good game with possibilities for a month or so, will become old hat after that.