All Slovenian CD-ROMs (3)

Acquiring knowledge with the help of games:

In February, we tested promotional and some of the latest referenced CD-ROMs, in April, directories and databases, and now we have selected a dozen educational, didactic, and similar CD-ROMs for testing. What can children, students, teachers, parents and everyone else learn from them?

At least a fifth of today’s publishing in the world is in electronic or in digital form – less and less on disks, mostly on CD-ROMs and more and more on the World Wide Web. Electronic publishing is expected to grow from about 20 percent to more than 50 percent over the next decade. Among the CD-ROMs of this type, which will be increasingly replaced by DVD-ROMs in the coming years, most are used for the purpose of gaming. Recently, the offer of educational CD-ROMs has been growing, especially for children, which are often joined by adults. Some of them are intended for acquiring knowledge through play, while others are serious didactic aids for children, high school students, teachers, students – depending on the content, software solutions, methodology, design, complexity and purpose. Like other, so-called non-book didactic materials, such as maps, audio cassettes, transparencies, computer programs – CD-ROMs have been taken seriously for some time and are an equal part of the mosaic of teaching aids. The list of additional didactic materials for primary and secondary schools for the 1998/99 school year, prepared by the National Education Institute (ZRSŠ), also includes a dozen domestic, translated and adapted CD-ROMs, which, like other aids provide students with content for dealing with individual topics of the curriculum and the catalog of knowledge, they also enable the consolidation, repetition, training and deepening of acquired knowledge. Some of them offer guidance to encourage students’ independent work (observation, data collection, recording of findings); they offer the teacher plenty of material to enrich the lesson.

Mladinska knjiga, with i-Rose as its contractor, released probably the first domestic educational CD-ROM three years ago. This was an electronic pictorial-letter wordbuilder prepared by Viljenka Jalovec as the author and Igor Ribič as the illustrator. It is intended for the initial literacy of children from the fourth to the ninth year and is a teaching aid included in the list of additional didactic materials for primary and secondary school for the 1998/99 school year of the National Education Institute, as a recommended didactic game for Slovene for the first grade of primary school. The audio-visual technique provides a link between auditory and visual symbol perception. Almost 250 pictures in the wordbuilder are a support in recognizing letters and enable the composition of words, even for a child without prior knowledge or with uncertain knowledge of letters. The child expands his vocabulary through pictured stories, voice puzzles and puzzles, as he learns more than two hundred words with their assistance. At the same time, he writes and reads them, thereby consolidating his knowledge and getting used to reading with understanding.

A new edition will soon be released, Wordbuilder set CD-ROM, which will be used by even more children, educators and parents. An English version of the Wordbuilder is also going to be released, called Wordbuilder CD ROM, it is basically similar to the Slovenian version. Picture presentations also enables the composition of words for a child who is just beginning to learn English. In addition to a CD-ROM, the package includes a user and installation guide. The Wordbuilder is a CD-ROM in our country, on which a catalog record of the publication of the National and University Library of Ljubljana is stated in the background of a plastic box.