Interactive, inspiring and specifically designed for your curriculum are the promises of each year's software bundle. The promises fill your mail and fill the huge exhibition hall that is Bett 2008. But how on earth can one measure them? The Bett awards shortlist is one way to measure quality while a decent demonstration can often show the promise. Does interaction mean guess and click or think and click? And what is your measure of value? Can you find five juicy ingredients for £100?
Year 5 Science Interactives (from Learning Connections, £44.95) is a great program to help explain concepts. An animated heart reacts to increasing exercise, an interactive bar chart graphs pulse rates and ice melts when the temperature of a beaker rises. You can sort materials and explore growing seeds, the water cycle, parts of a flower, and the moon's orbit. There's little on screen stating the obvious so these get you to learn. They let you pause and prompt discussion as interesting things happen.
For earlier years, comes Me and My Pet (from Spiny Software, £80). It uses video to show to pupils ages 4-6 animals eating, growing, moving and more. You see a pattern between a dog, cat, guinea pig, rabbit, hamster and budgie. You can add to what's here such as a video of the class's pets. On-screen activities have pupils compare animals with humans and for off-screen work there are paper activities.
Blackcat has Science Activity Builder (from £89) that lets you create professional-looking activities that can alone and run in a browser. A wizard drives you through customising various templates and the idea is to make activities to suit a class or support an individual with special educational needs. Activities take shape via crosswords and labelling exercises, and the wide range of topics includes electricity, life cycles, teeth and forces.
Users of Ginn's New Star Science scheme have Science Interactive Activities and Investigations (£75) which offers virtual experiments, fair tests and simulations where you might compare reversible and irreversible changes or burn candles on-screen. There are CDs for ages 7-11. Book publisher Rising Stars is showing Brain Academy Science Interactive (£150) for gifted and talented primary pupils. The focus is scientific enquiry with different ways of testing and predicting results. It may be used with whole classes or independently.
Secondary schools will be attracted to the freebie, Crocodile Science Player, which draws on Crocodile Clips' evolving series. It's remarkable that the series has been right for digial whiteboards even since they were. You can study projectiles using golf and change your shot's angle or strength. You can accelerate or brake a mini, investigate interference of water waves and move different camera lenses to see how image quality changes.
The Sunflower for Science series has gained more physics to complete an award-winning series. Earth in Space (£90, Sunflower Learning) has 3D models of planets, moons and a solar system. Animations help explain tides, eclipses, seasons, phases of the moon, and life cycles of stars. Another title, Nuclear Physics, shows what happens to particles in radioactive decay. Also new is a curriculum-matching tool and tests that you can watch mark themselves.
The hottest topic is covered by Climate Change (£49.95 from Focus Educational Software), which starts with a look at factors influencing the environment. Using text and pictures, it describes issues arising from energy use while animation sets out the technology solutions.
The gamut of English and Scottish science courses are covered by Boardworks (from £799) using PowerPoint presentations filled with pictures, activities and animation. These are matched to England's QCA KS3 Science Framework and Scottish Curriculum S1-S2. My own work is an animated compendium about organic chemistry (£199). Fresh from France comes eduMedia's science collection (£570) which includes scarce animation of topics such as the carbon cycle and retrograde motion of a planet.
It's interesting to see how book publishers are producing ICT resources that link or "blend" with textbooks. A new KS3 curriculum for 2008 has prompted Fusion Online from Nelson Thornes. It offers the flexibility to assign different resources to pupils according to individual needs. It has checks and level-assessed tasks to monitor pupils' progress and focus teaching effort where it's needed. Publisher Hodder Education also has an online resource called Dynamic Learning while Heinemann offers Go Science!
What remains of course is your measure of what is good. In the early days there was a desperate search for Windows software while measuring quality took a break. Today's want for VLE and online software platforms has rather put us back to where we started. Does any teacher's voice about what's good get heard these days? Or are technical fetishes now acquiring content for the oddest reasons?
2Simple Software(Bett stand F59): 2simple.com
BlackCat (295): blackcatsoftware.com
Boardworks (H29) boardworks.co.uk
Crocodile Clips (W7): crocodile-clips.com
Edumedia (B90): edumedia-sciences.com
Focus Educational Software (SW157) : focuseducational.com
Ginn & Heinemann (B40): ginn.co.uk.
Hodder Education (D67): dynamic-learning.co.uk
IT in Science & Roger Frost (S59): organic.rogerfrost.com
Learning connections: learning-connections.co.uk
Me and My Pet Spiny Software (SW 144): spinysoft.co.uk
Nelson Thornes (E50): nelsonthornes.com
Rising Stars (B25): risingstars-uk.com
RM (C60): rm.com
Sunflower Learning (R90): sunflowerlearning.com
Spiny software (SW144): spinysoft.co.uk