Kutoka Interactive is previewing two new titles in their Mia edutainment software series for 5 to 11 year olds at this week’s National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in Chicago. All Kutoka’s products are Mac compatible with Mac OS X native versions in the works.
The entire Mia series will be Carbonized, as will another planned entry in the series, Richard Vincent, president of Kutoka, told MacCentral. The most recent titles, “Mia: Just in Time!” and “Click & Create With Mia” are due in August.
“Mia: Just in Time!” is a story based adventure with mathematics as its learning focus. Combining games and learning activity, it offers an interactive story in which players have to solve various math activities to help Mia on her mission. The activities are integrated into the plot.
“It’s 50 percent game, 50 percent learning,” Vincent said. “We believe it’s crucial to get kids to learn without them even knowing that they’re learning. The educational activities are always part of the plot and scene. And we never cut away from a scene during an activity.”
“Click & Create with Mia” is Kutoka’s creativity tool. It offers a creativity kit featuring five play areas, where children can paint, learn to draw, create projects, work with pre-cut shapes and create animated scenes.
Both titles carry a manufacturers suggested retail price of US$19.95 and come on hybrid CDs with Mac and PC versions. Mac system requirements call for a Power Mac G3/233 or better; Mac OS 8.1 or higher; 64MB of RAM; a monitor with 640 x 480 resolution and 256 colors; a CD-ROM drive; and 40MB of hard disk space.
Kutoka also makes “Mia: The Search for Grandma’s Remedy” and “Mia: Romain’s New Hat.” The former includes such literary activities as vocabulary, early reading, word recognition, sentence comprehension, rhyming, spelling and phonics. The latter is packed with age-appropriate science activities; some of the topics covered are the solar system, electricity, matter, plants, animals, fossils and the human body.