Time Out

Anyone who's recently visited a software store or browsed the Web will have noticed the plethora of CD-ROM "edutainment" titles vying for kids' attention (and parents' wallets). Unfortunately, many of these titles and websites serve to market a television property or cartoon personality. Face it-a game featuring Goofy may teach kids to spell, but it's primarily promoting a Disney product. Parents looking for something more squarely educational should explore the refreshing Sprocketworks ($70 for four volumes), a subscription-based quarterly CD-ROM title introduced in March; a free companion website will launch at the end of this month.

Developed by Silicon Valley interactive design veteran Animatrix (creator of the first Guided Tour for the Macintosh and other interactive "program tours"), SprocketWorks differs from the typical Disney, Barbie or Rugrats fare in that its topics, which include classical music, space travel and chemistry, are entirely reality-based. "Everything in SprocketWorks is about the world we live in," says Animatrix president Marney Morris, who teaches interactive design at Stanford and has been designing interfaces since 1984. "There are no animated characters, no talking animals dressed up in clothes." Instead, the user-friendly software features digital images of rockets, composers and constellations backed up by time lines, brief factual blurbs, and plenty of musical and spoken-text sound bites (including the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth and the Gettysburg Address, among others).

The series' first installment covers music, space and U.S. history. (Future volumes will cover flight, horses, automobiles, dinosaurs, toys, sports and the human body.) To learn about space, users browse through an interactive, moving photographic rendering of our solar system. Clicking on an orbiting planet brings up NASA photos of its moons and background information on size, atmosphere, and the kind of space suit you'd need to visit it. To explore topics on U.S. history, users can view a historical map that changes according to where the cursor is stopped on a time line: A map showing the locations of this continent's Native American tribes transforms to display the first European settlements; colonies and territories become states before the user's eyes. The music section also implements a time line-move the cursor over a name of a particular composer or band, and you'll hear a music sample. It's a great way, even for adults, to learn about Mozart, Beethoven or even Public Enemy without feeling embarrassed about asking what might seem like an obvious question.

Despite its wealth of information (and its coverage of topics, such as music, that are increasingly being cut from American classroom instruction), SprocketWorks is no replacement for school. Its content is broad, but not deep. "We're about making complicated things simple," says Morris. "We don't want it to be an encyclopedia. SprocketWorks is a set of learning activities that gives kids a fundamental understanding of and confidence in an area." Morris likens SprocketWorks to National Geographic, which aims its stories at the general reader and uses some of the best photographers in the world.

For the time being, SprocketWorks' two media formats are designed to complement each other. Graphics, video and other highbandwidth-dependent features such as the multimedia timelines and morphing maps (in addition to fun items like games, sticker printing and photo-manipulation programs) are located on CD-ROM; the website will include low-res features such as daily news, offline lessons, e-mail accounts and a mock stock market.

"If broadband were here today, we wouldn't do this on CD-ROM at all" says Morris. "Nowadays, the time it takes to download rich graphics and sound is prohibitive. We're using the CD-ROM as a means to get rich graphics and sound to our users." Assuming high-bandwidth access to the Internet becomes widely available in the near future, Morris plans to put all of SprocketWork's content-including what is currently available on CD-ROM-online, free of charge.

SprocketWorks (Animatrix, PC/Mac hybrid CD-ROM, $24.95 each, $70 for four) is available at www.sprocketworks.com.