Thank Goodness for Old Computer Games · Thursday May 10, 2007 by Abbie
I was right about the tennis! This morning Ram told me all about how tennis is scored. I suggested that he might be interested in watching a bit of Wimbledon on TV this year. He thought about that for a moment (he never answers right away because it takes him a while to process things) and said yes!
It was a very different day today than we have recently have been having. Ram had noticed the Dxh’s old Discworld games on the shelf and decided to try them. We couldn’t get the voice overs to work on Discworld 1 so I spent most of the morning reading things to him. He doesn’t need absolutely everything read to him, but he does still have problems and if we was stuck on something it was usually because he hadn’t read it properly.
Ram decided that he would give up on Discworld 1 and load up Disworld 2. Luckily we have two hard disks in Ram’s computer specifically for the old games that need to work on Windows95. Although we did manage to confuse the computer by having two external drives. The game wouldn’t load up because it didn’t recognise the CD drive. We tried all sorts of things, until I finally realised that all I had to do was put it in the DVD drive, which also recognises CDs! I think it is good for kids to see their parents struggle sometimes. It lets them know that everyone has difficulty and no one gets it right all the time.
The voice overs were working in the game, so I didn’t have to read as much. But as the game is actually an adult game, there was no way Ram would ever be able to do it on his own. I don’t think I could do it on my own either! So I searched the Internet and found some hint generators and a walk through. Because they were quite hard to read and were on my computer, I had to keep switching over from what I was doing to the websites and read the next steps for Ram.
I am sure that some would think of this as cheating, but actually it is very educational. Ram has problems remembering sequences of things, so by me reading out several steps to follow, and then letting him try to do it, it is helping develop his skills.
After watching It’s Not Easy Being Green, Ram went back to play the game for a while. I finally put my foot down and said bedtime. He saved his game and exited it. As he normally uses the XP disk on that computer he had forgotten what he had on the Win98 disk. He clicked on a game from Grey Olltwit’s Educcational Freeware that was about dinosaurs.
It is always frustrating to have Ram start an educational game so late at night. Half of me wants to let him play it as it is hard to get him to do overtly educational things. The other half of me is already asleep!
