Weirdstop and Coolstop Teacher Review

Prepared for Computer Corner in Education

Computers are amazing tools. Most of us use them on a daily basis for everything from desktop publishing to surfing the Internet. While computers are a valuable aid, research has shown that computers can have an adverse effect on reading comprehension levels. While our comprehension rate on printed material is usually in the 80-90% range it falls to 60-70% when we have to read the material on a computer screen. How many of us have become so frustrated with trying to read something on the computer screen that we have resorted to the printer?

With this in mind we were intrigued when Edsoft handed us two programs by Australian children’s author Libby Hathorn. Weirdstop and Coolstop are promoted as an engaging interactive literacy program for students ten to fourteen years old. Weirdstop, is the first in the series and contains nine interactive stories. Coolstop is the second in the series.

Rather than listening to the hype we decided to test the programs at the coal-face, in Bill’s year 5-6 class. We decided to use Coolstop, the latest in the series, to see how engaging it really was in the classroom.

Coolstop contains six stories The Runner, Surfer Joe, Six Balls, The Story of Rugby, Wicked Wizards and Take on the World. The stories run in Flash and are well written and include games, puzzles, videos and some fantastic graphics. The stories are broken into short passages with most pages fitting into the screen with little or no scrolling.

What we liked about the product is that the content of the stories hasn’t been overtaken by the impressive multimedia production. The stories covered topics such as sexual discrimination, ambition, personal identity and self doubt and certainly appealed to the children. Who else but a savvy mobile phone user would understand the following from the story“Take on the World”: 8 banana (o--

The stories include fiction and non-fiction and cover a range of text types from personal narratives to factual recounts.

To use the program the class was divided into three groups. One group worked on the computers reading and interacting with the program by reading the text, and completing the games and puzzles.

Another group worked on the excellent worksheets that accompanied each story. The worksheets include a range of activities to develop critical literacy skills and the activity headings have references to Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. The worksheets also have references to Stage 4 English outcomes but we found that the stories were more than suitable for Stage 3 students.

The remaining group worked with the teacher reading a hard copy of each story that was printed from the CD-ROM. Each group rotated on a daily basis.

The verdict? The students loved the interactive stories on the CD-ROM. The take off of the Channel Nine commentary team at the start of Six Balls certainly tickled our funny bones as well. The worksheets held the student’s interest and the range of activities was certainly impressive. It was definitely helpful to be able to print out each story so that each student could have a hard copy when it came to discussing the topics. The program certainly worked extremely well in a classroom setting.

Overall we would have to say that we were very impressed with the programs and look forward to getting our hands on the next program in the series, Wonderstop.

Software supplied for review by Edsoft. Software reviewed by Rosemary McDowall and Bill Gillespie. Rosemary teaches at Mosman HS while Bill teaches at Seaforth PS. They can be contacted at computer_corner2000@yahoo.com