April 1998



New Math Blaster and Reading Blaster Series from Davidson & Associates

Davidson & Associates, a division of Cendant Software recently introduced several new CDs in their Math Blaster and Reading Blaster educational software series. If you have kids, but don't know about the Blasters, then it's time to learn. Your kids will definitely have fun learning with these CDs.

Reading Blaster Ages 9-12

Your kids, ages 9 through 12, will get lots of help with reading in this multimedia adventure game featuring Dr. Dabble in his strange mansion in Bizarroville. Your goal is to help find six missing citizens who vanished, and the blame is on Dr. Dabble.

You'll use your reading and comprehension skills to rescue the missing Bazarrovillians. Kids will spend hours roaming the halls and rooms of this spooky mansion searching for clues to analyze and solve the mystery. Davidson is on to something because an adventure game setting is great way to learn.

Reading Blaster Ages 9-12 offers 75 different mystery stories, three levels of difficulty, with 7 stories that are printable to encourage further reading. Over 20 essential reading skills are covered including sentence structure, parts of speech, grammar, analogies, definitions, synonyms and antonyms, logical reasoning, finding main ideas, reading for details, drawing conclusions, inferences and sequencing.

Math Blaster Ages 9-12

This is multimedia adventure game with the famous Blasternauts (of the Math and Reading Blaster Series) who crash land on the edge of a crater and then enter into the weird world of math and monkeys. Their goal is to escape using their math skills which include solving equations and working with fractions. In their adventure they'll find jungles and swamplands with flying monkeys as well as math and arcade games to apply their advanced math skills.

Math Blaster Ages 9-12 offers more than 50,000 different problems, three levels of difficulty, on-line math help and Cruncher Blaster, Davidson's version of a spreadsheet program. Over 15 essential math skills are covered including adding, subtracting, multiplying equations with 2 and 3 operands, estimating within a range, positive and negative numbers, adding fractions with common and uncommon denominators, adding fractions, decimals and percents to make a whole, identifying complex patterns and applying logic to solve complex equations.

Math Blaster Pre-Algebra

Math Blaster Pre-Algebra is another multimedia adventure game that features Dr.Dabble and his spooky mansion, for kids ages 10 and up. This devious doctor is draining math from brains around the world using his math-stealing machine. Students will help stop Dabble's evils by solving pre-algebra and word problems found in the many rooms of this weird mansion.

This CD offers more than 4,000 word problems, three levels of difficulty, an on-line calculator and more. It also covers more than 15 essential math skills including computation using decimals, integers and rational numbers, solving word problems, ratios, proportions and percents, translating mathematical expressions, applying order of operations, creating mathematical equations, graphing, manipulating positive and negative numbers, estimation and logical thinking.

Math Blaster Algebra

Math Blaster Algebra is an space adventure that kids, ages 10 and up, will love to get their hands on. After you and your spaceship just barely survives colliding with an asteroid, you are stranded in space surrounded by alien armies getting ready to destroy you. Your goal is to repair the ship by correctly answering algebra problems in each of the five damaged rooms. The CD offers six activities that cover one full year of high school algebra.

The CD offers six activities covering one full year of high school algebra, tutorials and practice problems, videos with step-by-step demonstrations of algebra concepts, progress reports and more. Algebra skills covered include order of operations, factoring, integers, polynomial operations, algebraic functions, graphing linear and parabolic equations, systems of equations, equations and inequalities, quadratic equations and word problems.

The above Math Blaster and Reading Blaster CDs includes great graphics and sounds with lots of learning at a street price of around $30. They run on most IBM compatibles with Windows and the Apple Macintosh multimedia computers. Both systems require a double-speed CD-ROM drive.

For more information, contact Davidson & Associates at 1-800-545-7677.

Howard Berenbon