Techno files - keeping up with your kids

About Kids Magazine (NZ), March 2002

AN ABSOLUTE BEAUTY - eVac-U8! from Windy Towers (7+) RRP $49.95. This has to be the best edutainment software I have seen in a very long time. Designed for kids aged seven and up and based on the Australian maths curriculum (but eminently suitable for Kiwi kids), eVac-U8! uses state-of-the-art graphics and programming to create a colourful world of weirdo characters, scuttle-bugs and toilet humour. The game is complex - your Great Aunt Dimensia lives in Windy Towers, a decrepit mansion heated by the intestinal gases of a dragon in the basement that needs constant feeding on scuttle-bug poops. Guided by a smart alec, two-headed doll that aunty has knitted you, you have to discover and complete a myriad of mathematical tasks in order to gather up the parts to reassemble the Vac, an allergic spaceship that you blew up by mistake....You get the picture!

eVac-U8! is jammed full of farty noises, plopericks and bad jokes (Windy Towers, get

it?) and every kid I tried it on adored it! They didn't even notice the educational point of the challenges they have to meet, which include logic skills, odds and evens, making change, spatial awareness grouping, addition, multiplication, greater and less than, number patterns and telling the time.

There are hours and hours of fun here - even I got addicted and had to spend several days playing to get it out of my system. Highly recommended.