TWO REVIEWS:

1) Horsez for PC, by Ubisoft $26.99 on Amazon. Rated E.

First of all, what’s with the “z”? Is someone in the software industry under the impression that a game about horses is inner-city cool? Do the ponies rap? Maybe the folks at Ubisoft just forgot to run their spellchecker.

This was an impulse buy when I took dd4 into the game store to get a Sims 2 game for the teengirl. It has a mare and foal on the front. The back of the package says, “Pick your perfect pony from lots of adorable breeds. Learn how to raise, groom and feed him.” The three other comments on the back say that you can participate in horse shows, compete, and join an academy.

I guessed from this that dd would be able to play the initial game of picking a pony and riding it around, and we’d just skip the rest.

I got the damned thing home and installed it. It’s a linear adventure about people in a riding academy. There was no horse picking. That must come later in the game. Instead, I got to deal with their interface. I don’t have a lot of patience for things that are made poorly, and this crap is well into that category. I finally quit when I had to select a class schedule by clicking and dragging classes onto a scheduler. Except that I couldn’t do that, and I couldn’t exit the screen either. The manual, as it’s laughingly called, didn’t address this or any other issue I had. So I made my apologies to dd, packed up the disks, and I’m taking the whole thing back to the store.

I think this might be a good game for a preteen girl who likes horses and has some patience with stupid game design. If Ubisoft had put *that* on the back, I’d have saved some money.

Website is here:http://petz.us.ubi.com/horsez/
I think the graphics look like something from the Teletubbies.

2) Nebel’s Elementary Education: Creating a Tapestry of Learning, Bernard J Nebel, Ph.D., Nebel’s Press for Learning. 2001. $18.27 on Amazon.

This is a 429 page softcover book that purports to be a “how-to” manual/guide for providing a complete K-5 curiculum. I figured it didn’t when I bought it, but I was curious.

Nebel has an interesting educational philosophy stressing comprehension and the interconnectedness of all knowledge. He divides his book into seven “themes” that made little sense to me. Water Wonders is a separate theme from Physical Forces and Principles, for instance. Other themes include Communication and the odd blend of Values, Purpose, History and Society.

I found the first few chapters of this book very useful, and they are the reason I will keep it on my shelf. In them, he talks about the practice of teaching. Through page 54 in the middle of the third chapter, I loved this book. Just for example, Nebel discusses how to handle student questions, how to praise, how to say you don’t know, and different teaching methods. After that, it becomes more focussed on what to teach than on how to teach it and I found that far less helpful. Perhaps if he’s put all that information into a list format I’d have liked it better, but its all embedded in prose. On the positive side, each chapter ends with a section of resources for the reader. In sum, for me the first few chapters were worth the rest of the book. If you are an experienced teacher you likely don’t need this, but I’m not and I will certainly use it.

Website is here: http://www.pressforlearning.com/