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As its name suggests, the GCSE Triple Pack (English, Maths and French) includes three CD-ROMs designed for 14-16 year olds, in accordance with the National Curriculum and incorporating material for all examining boards. The three discs were previously available individually but this is the first time they've been combined. To take them in turn, GCSE English sets up an electronic staff room with five tutors--Jane Austen, a TV journalist, a modern poet, an English teacher and a travel writer; each of these animated characters will guide you through the various activities and lessons which cover punctuation, writing, reading, spelling, grammar, meeting deadlines and finally, exam practice. The animated guides appear at the bottom left of the lesson screen and there's an impressive degree of interactivity with lots of questions to answer, buttons to click, sentences to correct and so on; there's also a selection of exam-style questions. GCSE Maths is divided into four chapters covering the key topics--numbers, algebra, shape, space and measure, and how to handle data. It's slightly different to the others though in that you can run it in three "modes": learning mode, test mode and exam mode. Each lesson is accompanied by an animated guide who explains what you've got to do and there are plenty of opportunities in each section to answer questions as you follow through the various topics; incidentally, there's a clever "see also" feature which allows you to jump straight to related topics. GCSE French is divided into six chapters covering grammar, spelling, vocabulary, verbs, study skills and exam practice--this provides a good balance for students who want to recap the kind of things they've been learning in class while at the same time gearing up for the final exams. Interactivity is good, animated character guides lead you through each chapter (though surely those are English actors pretending to be French) and there's plenty to keep the interest up. By the way; if you get stuck on a word or phrase that's in red but isn't in the vocab list, right click on it with the mouse and a translation will pop up. The unified interface is clever--as you install the three programs, each one is added to the main menu--and the high levels of multimedia make these products engaging as well as educational. The ability to set the ability level of each program (higher or foundation) is useful and overall, they're good value. --Rob Beattie
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