| Cruncher, The | Berkeley Learning Technologies Inc., Davidson & Associates / Knowledge Adventure | 1994 | |
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This is a full-featured, easy to use spread sheet for children and adults that includes animation, speech, music, and sound effects. Using step-by-step tutorials, it teaches users ages 10 and up spreadsheet and math fundamentals. The program's real-world examples, such as party planning, family budgeting, and baseball statistics tracking, illustrate how to use math and spreadsheets in everyday life. By combining these tutorials and projects with a full-featured spreadsheet, it's easy enough for children to understand and use, but powerful enough to meet adult's spreadsheet needs. The software is also available in teacher packs, lab packs, and site licenses through Educational Resources and other educational software resellers. It has three components: tutorials, projects, and spreadsheets. Each has been designed to be easy enough for beginners yet powerful enough for adults. These components cover subjects that appeal to both groups, including family trips, party planning, and organizing all kinds of mathematical information. This approach also means that users won't outgrow it - the tutorials and projects address a range of experience levels. In addition, it features an on-line help system that is easy to use for beginners, but extensive enough for more advanced users. In the tutorials section, six examples teach topics starting with basic spreadsheet operations and progressing to the use of advanced spreadsheet features. The simplest one, "Fish Out of Water," uses pictures instead of numbers to manipulate data. Students combine a fish, a fish bowl, water and other items in spreadsheet cells; they must do this correctly for the fish to live. This demonstrates the basics of spreadsheets in a friendly and non-intimidating way. Ten different projects and templates provide real-life examples of how spreadsheets can be useful in everyday life. For example, the "Basketball Statistics" project teaches students how to calculate shooting percentages, total points, and overall percentages for their favorite basketball players. "I Want a Walkman!(TM)" teaches students how to use a spreadsheet to manage a budget. Students can track their income and expenses to show how much money they save, and how much time it will take to save the money needed for a desired purchase such as a Walkman. The spreadsheet offers features included in most business spreadsheet software, including charting and graphing capabilities with pie charts, bar and line graphs, and scatter charts; complex cell calculations; and advanced trigonometry functions. It also offers four unique features that make it ideal for beginners: A "notebook" attached to each spreadsheet - This includes a simple word processor where users can keep notes on their spreadsheets, explain formulas or write a detailed report; The "sticker picker" - A library of 100 illustrations, 13 sound effects, and 20 animations can be included anywhere in spreadsheets, charts or the notebook. Users can record their own sound effects or up to 20 seconds of spoken text. They can also create their own stickers by importing art from other programs; Text-to-speech capabilities - Users can select any words or numbers in a spreadsheet or the notebook, and it will read them aloud. This helps double-check data. In 1999, an updated version, The Cruncher 2.0 was released. | ||
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