Broderbund Software: Carmen Sandiego Math Detective

The Carmen Sandiego series are spy adventure programs. Carmen devises an evil plot and you are challenged to stop her. In Math Detective, she shrinks many of the world's famous sites such as the Great Wall of China, Grand Canyon, Mount Everest and Ayers Rock. Your challenge is to restore these famous places to their rightful size, deactivate her nefarious Quantum Crystalizer machine (see middle right) and bring an end to her nasty plan.

As a secret agent you travel to 12 different enemy hide-outs scouting around for clues. Each hide-out conceals one of the 12 shrunken landmarks. A "high tech" math machine (see bottom right) appears each time you discover a clue in the hide-out you are in. Each time you solve the math questions you are given a password. When you get two passwords from a hide-out you can get the crystal that contains one of the sites that Carmen has shrunk. Then you are off to the next hide-out to get the next set of clues.

You can choose from 3 levels of difficulty to find the best match for your skill level. There are 5 different high tech math machines within the program each designed to challenge you with different types of math problems . The 5 math machines have thousands of exercises and over 400 word based math problems, which allow the user to practice and build their core math and geometry skills.

The program meaningfully challenges kids from the ages of 8 to 14 because it has 3 completely different operating levels of difficulty in all the math skill activity areas. You choose the appropriate level for your child or student. Many of the exercises require the user to do the math calculations in one's head. A practice area will show you 34 different strategies helpful in completing the exercises. There is also a page that tracks very specific performance information on each player.

This program as with all Carmen Sandiego programs, will attract the child who loves mystery, intrigue and most importantly a challenge of being able to conquer (not unlike Nintendo). This program is well-suited for the child who is determined, who enjoys math and who likes to have a competitive challenge. This program is principally designed to reinforce existing skills, as well as build your speed and accuracy of doing math in one's head.

Learning Areas: exercises skills in addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, estimating, converting fractions and decimals, calculating percentages, geometry. Teaches 34 math strategies that can be used to solve these types of math questions.