'JumpStart' series makes leap to the Wii

— -- Since the mid-1990s, Knowledge Adventure has been at the forefront of learning software for kids with its award-winning JumpStart series of computer games. Now the company is leading the way with educational games on the Nintendo Wii.

With JumpStart Pet Rescue, a Wii game targeted at kids ages 3 to 6, Knowledge Adventure has made good use of its expertise in educational games to create fun activities in which preschoolers can practice their ABCs, match numbers to grouped objects, learn colors by netting specifically colored fish, and practice sorting by attributes.

Knowledge Adventure has correctly identified that young children like to create avatars, own and play with virtual pets, explore colorful worlds full of talking animal friends, have books read out loud, watch videos, sing songs and go on missions to rescue animals.

What Knowledge Adventure didn't do well is figure out how most preschoolers interact comfortably with the Wii remote. It's too bad the company didn't pay attention to the work done by others, particularly 2K Play in its development of the preschool Wii games Go Diego Go!: Safari Rescue and Dora the Explorer: Dora Saves the Snow Princess. By partnering with Nickelodeon, which did in-home research on how preschoolers could best use the Wii controllers, 2K Play was able to incorporate Wii-centric motions into its games that were intuitive to preschoolers. In the 2K Play preschool Wii games, kids play by turning the Wii remote sideways and then simply tilting it left and right.

In JumpStart Pet Rescue, preschoolers are asked to point the Wii remote at the TV screen to find a white arrow or a hand cursor. They are then asked to push the "A" button, and their avatar will walk to where they pointed. This method of navigation isn't as intuitive as simply tilting the remote in the direction you want to go. Also problematic is the camera angle, which looks over the shoulder of the child's avatar. In JumpStart Pet Rescue, the avatar frequently blocks the child's ability to see the cursor. Kids can use the up arrow on the control pad to move forward, and the side arrows to move the camera angle; but this is pretty sophisticated stuff, and way past the abilities of most 3-year-olds. Another frustration is that the game has long load times when you enter buildings and others locations, which forces impatient youngsters to wait for their gaming.