                      Smithsonian Dinosaur Museum
                     Reviewed by Gail B.C. Marsella

        The Smithsonian Institution is up against some tough competition
with Dinosaur Museum. Kids get dinosaur overload everywhere they turn, from
Jurassic Park to science class in school to T-shirts, toys, and birthday
cakes. They may very well be getting sick of the subject.
        Not to worry, this is a beautifully designed and implemented
educational program. Available on CD-ROM for both Macintosh and Windows, it
features gorgeous graphics (some in 3-D), an intuitive interface, a dinosaur
trivia game, several clips from classic dinosaur movies like "The Lost
World," and interesting authoritative text. It also, thank God, only takes
up about three megs of hard disk space, and installs directly and simply
from the CD-ROM.
        The opening screen fades to a choice of three doors: the
conservatory, the library, and the game room. The library has three books in
it, one from each of the major periods - Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous
- and the information is organized around individual dinosaur species of
those periods. After choosing a species, you go to a museum-like room to
learn about that species.
        The information in the conservatory overlaps with that in the
library to a certain extent, but the focus is on the theories about and
ecology of whole groups of dinosaurs and their surrounding environment. This
is the place to find extinction theories, myths, movie clips, references,
and the physiography of the specific periods. In both the library and the
conservatory, the child explores and gathers information by clicking objects
on the screen to open new text and graphics areas.
        The games (in three increasingly challenging modules) ask questions
about dinosaurs, and correct answers are rewarded with a puzzle piece added
to a blank puzzle in one corner. (The child chooses yes or no to the
question by clicking one of two cartoon dinosaurs; one is nodding, and the
other shaking its head.) Answers to all of the game questions can be found
somewhere in either the library or conservatory.
        Adults are not always qualified to review a kid's program, so I got
some assistance from two younger members of the household and a friend of
theirs. The older child (age 11) felt it was too easy and probably designed
for littler kids, but she thoroughly explored the movie clips and played the
trivia game for quite awhile before professing to lose interest. The younger
children (both age 9) played with it for several hours without either
frustration or boredom (although they were impatient with the fade-ins
between screens, which take about five seconds apiece). Two of the children
were delighted to find some discrepancies between the information in the
program and the alleged facts in the movie Jurassic Park. The 3-D glasses,
usable on certain labeled screens, elicited the most excitement - they are
just cardboard, and rather flimsy, but they do the job. The reading level is
pretty high, so the most interested audience is probably somewhere between
the second and sixth grade.
        I did have trouble with the sound - okay, I usually have trouble
with the sound, at least for a while - and this time it was not fixable.
Dinosaur Museum supports a sound card, but apparently not mine (an Ensoniq
Soundscape that emulates SoundBlaster), and the manual was useless. There is
no way to choose a particular card or find out where the program is trying
to access the sound files. In short, there is no way to troubleshoot it.
        The telephone support is not much help either. They cheerfully
informed me that my sound card must be the culprit, it probably needed new
drivers, and I should contact the manufacturer. I downloaded the latest set
of drivers and installed them, but the problem remained. Fortunately, every
sound error message asks whether you want to see any more error messages or
not; just say no and you can use the program silently without further
interruption. Ordinarily that would be a severe criticism, but in this case
the program is so reasonably priced and well designed that it's worth a
serious look even without the sound.
        Note: The original publisher of Dinosaur Museum was Software
Marketing Corporation in Arizona. It is now published by SoftKey
International, so the phone numbers and address are different from those
listed in the user's manual.

                Smithsonian Institution Dinosaur Museum
                  Published by: SoftKey International
                    Telephone (new): (617) 494-1200
                Technical Support (new): (404) 428-0008

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