Didi & Ditto Kindergarten

Didi & Ditto - Kindergarten is the debut software title in the newest series from Kutoka Interactive, the producers of the award-winning Mia software. This series is grade-based, rather than the subject-based Mia games. Didi and Ditto are playing a game of ball in the forest, when suddenly they're captured by a very hungry wolf. Fortunately for them, the wolf would much rather eat veggies than beavers, so all they have to do is scour the forest for enough fruits and vegetables to satisfy the wolf. In order to find the vegetables, players will have to play lots of games to help the forest inhabitants, who will in return give vegetables for each game successfully completed.

There are twelve main activities that provide food; there are also two activities, a coloring book one and a letter recognition game that don't furnish food on completion. The activities focus on typical kindergarten skills such as letter recognition, rhyming, patterns, counting, number recognition and simple addition equations. Some of the activities are The Bees, a really cute game where players click the bees to either count them on the easy levels, or match the answer on an addition equation on the hardest level; Pond Crossing, a fun Frogger approach to simple math equations; Blowing Bubbles, a pattern recognition game where players choose the correct shape from various falling shapes; Rhyme Catching, a game that requires the picture of a rhyming word to be matched with another picture; and Chicken Coup, another pattern recognition game.

The activities are fairly well-designed, except for a few instances, but getting to them can be quite a problem, especially for five-year-olds. The activities are reached by clicking on fixed items within certain locations, but for some reason these clickable spots are not obvious at all. For instance, to access Pond Crossing, a small frog way in the back of a bunch of frogs must be clicked. It took me awhile to find it. There are several other activities that are as difficult to find. Another problem is the "Back" button: one, it's not obvious where it is, and two, players can't click back to the main screen to quit. The Options button must be clicked to reach the main screen and quit.

While many of the activities are fun, they suffer a little from a few design flaws. The main problem is that kids are required to "drag" the items in each game, rather than just click on them. This requires more coordination than some kindergartners have. The Alphabet Cave has the letter Z named as "Zev" instead of "Zee". There is no randomization for some reason in the Falling Leaves game; instead, the same leaves are missing every time. Also, the game plays slowly, in that kids must sit through long animations of "clickable hotspots" or wait-times until the activity is loaded.

The activities do a fair job of presenting basic Kindergarten skills, especially the math games. The language arts games aren't quite as good, and despite the phonics claim on the box, there is no sounding out of letter sounds, at least not that I ever heard while playing.

A good feature of the interface is the ability to choose levels while playing the individual games, and being able to play the games independently from the adventure, by choosing the options screen.

The games are pretty fun, and we were tickled by things like the way the bees' eyes bugged out when caught, and the way the turtle blew bubbles in the Bubble Blowing game. Playing the Frogger game is amusing, too. The incredible graphics of this game really add to the fun, and the large amount of clickables are also cute, although somewhat slow.