Timmy & The Magic Pictures is an interactive reading adventure for children aged between 3 and 8. As with all Compedia software, it has been created with a user friendly interface aimed at kids and is free of bugs.
The premise behind Timmy & The Magic pictures is teaching children a wide range of educational skills such as pre-reading, vocabulary and visual perception to name a few. The reading adventure is written by award-winning author David Grossman who is known for popular selling children's books.
The game starts outside Timmy's house where you can click on a number of interactive objects. By clicking on Timmy's window, you venture into the bedroom which is filled with various types interactive games.
Timmy has discovered that if he clicks on his paintings in his bedroom, these paintings come to life. These paintings contain many different games such as matching the right colours with the objects shown in the picture or even learning to play the xylophone.
The graphics of this game appear very simplistic as colourful and my 4-year old nephew loved them. These graphics are aimed at expanding your children's visual perception and colour coordination.
The beauty of Timmy & The Magic Pictures is that just about everything on the screen is interactive. Whether it's the soccer ball in the toy box or the money sitting on the window ledge, everything has a purpose.
As with all Compedia games, everything is clearly read to the child that greatly increases their understanding of the game. The game does not talk down to the children either but rather speaks to them on their level. Apart from the professional voices and sound effects, the game features some very lively music that according to my nephew, made this game "cool".
The learning of the game was extremely easy for my nephew to pick up and he was clicking on things that I had missed in my initial review of the game. The game is aimed at increasing the following skills of children;
- Pre-reading & Reading
- Vocabulary
- Creativity
- Critical Thinking
- Visual Perception
- Auditory Comprehension.
The game is designed to run a multitude of different PC's and requires a minimum Pentium 166, CDROM, 32 MB RAM, Windows 95 or greater and a 16-bit sound card.
