There is no better time to get children involved with computers than when they’re very young and there’s no better way than with the multitude of edutainment products now available. A couple of new TDK releases featuring the superstar pig Babe are a good example of this – a recognisable main character, fun activities and educational too! 

Aimed at 3-year-olds and over the first is an ANIMATED PRE-SCHOOL ADVENTURE designed to teach number and letter recognition as well as a touch of ecological awareness. Babe and his pals want to put on a circus show in aid of charity but first they need to sell tickets. Six interactive areas around town will help them to do this but first they’ll need to help the townsfolk with their chores. 

In the Graffiti Cleanup area they get the chance to remove unsightly scrawls and replace them with their own colourful pictures, which can then be printed out and saved. The Community Garden needs an exact number of seeds planting in the right places before they will all burst into colourful life and this will help with counting and number recognition. Over in the Flealands Hotel there are lots of items out of place but matching the shapes will soon have the rooms looking neat and tidy. 

Tree Planting in the park is another area where numeric skills are used, as well as fruit shape recognition, then there’s the bandstand for counting and music or Footpath Beautification, which is a bit like the Frogger game. Complete three of these tasks and the animals will put on a show complete with trampolines, jugglers and unicycles. 

The other title, ANIMATED EARLY READER, concentrates mainly on literacy and letter recognition and it takes the form of an interactive animated story. Once again, big-hearted Babe and his chums are doing good deeds, this time it’s feeding the hungry animals of Metropolis.  

The storybook is narrated with each group of words highlighted as they are spoken. This makes it simple for the child to associate the spoken words with the written ones but a click of the mouse will re-read the passage as many times as necessary. Each page also contains several hot spots that trigger an amusing animation or an alphabet flash card and, when they have explored every nook and cranny they can click on an arrow to move on.  

Interactivities within the story get children to buy food for the animals, borrow a truck by cleaning up the junkyard, raise cash and find a selection of pots and pans but each one is keyed to reading skills in some way. This could be rhyming words, letter recognition or spelling and the themes cover community services, caring for others, recycling and achieving goals. 3 levels of difficulty cater for children at various stages of reading expertise but all ages will love the coloured pictures that can be printed out and collected.