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As its name suggests, the GCSE Triple Pack (English, Maths and Spanish) includes three CD-ROMs designed for 14-16 year olds, in accordance with the National Curriculum and incorporating material appropriate 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. In GCSE Spanish your animated guides are Perica the parrot and Chiquito the dog, who will guide you through chapters on grammar, spelling, vocabulary, verb tables, study skills and finally, exam practice. There's plenty of interactivity in the lessons, including spelling games and quizzes and an excellent vocab book which, when you click on the Spanish phrase, says it out loud. There are also good tips for students trying to revise or prepare for final exams. And 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. 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. 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 also useful and overall, they're good value. --Rob Beattie
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