Finding Nemo: Learning with Nemo (Windows, Mac)

The stars of the award-winning film Finding Nemo swim onto the computer screen in FINDING NEMO: LEARNING WITH NEMO. This software for preschoolers teaches them about colors, shapes, recognizing patterns, identifying letters, counting, and more. It's Nemo's first day of school, and his class is going on a scavenger hunt. with Dory tagging along as an adult chaperone. The scavenger hunt takes players to a coral reef, an ocean dropoff, the open ocean and the harbor of Sydney, Australia.

In each location, kids can click on objects to play four educational games, learn science facts, and discover amusing animations and mini-activities. The games can be played on three levels of difficulty, including Easy Play for kids as young as 2 or 3. In one game, players count colored eels to match numbers on a grid drawn in the sand. After the scavenger hunt, kids can create on-screen pictures using sea-animal stickers earned during the scavenger hunt.

This edutainment software is a visual delight to explore. The interactive underwater environments encourage kids to practice moving the mouse and clicking. The software smoothly incorporates learning into the scavenger hunt theme. The developers did a great job with this title, but they didn't provide enough of the big blue ocean to explore.

The Easy Play level for the youngest players is particularly well done. In this mode, the game is less analytical, and it encourages kids to simply explore. For example, in the matching eel game, instead of counting, youngsters just click on any colored square in the grid to make the eels disappear.