Based on Scholastic’s bestselling book series, The Magic School Bus Explores Bugs CD-ROM offers an introduction to the insect kingdom. By clicking on characters and background objects players can move to a new environment, play games, or watch short multimedia presentations. The presentations are full of fascinating facts and exceptional photography, but the program’s flawed design makes the material difficult to absorb. For example, it’s impossible to pause a presentation in order to examine a close-up photograph. Likewise, vocabulary words never appear onscreen, so important terms used in the presentations (such as arthropod or arachnid ) are likely to go in one ear and out the other. The teaching methods used in the CD-ROM don’t do the book justice, the book being a much safer bet for fun and engaging insect-themed adventures.