The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Tour the U.S.A. Without Leaving Home

My family likes to take car trips during the summer. One year we got to several western states, but this is the first time that we’ve been able to cover the entire country. We’ve also taken a submarine tour of the Seven Seas. All this without leaving home.

Our vehicle is the PC and CD-ROM drive, and our travel agent for the tour of the United States is Travelrama USA (Windows and Mac, $29.95) from Sanctuary Woods ([800] 943-3664 or [415] 286-6000), a geography game designed for kids ages 7 or older. Our submarine ride was courtesy of Operation Neptune, a pre-algebra game from the Learning Co.([510] 792-2101).

Travelrama USA, which can be played by one to four people, has you travel the highways of America in search of monuments, national parks, historic sites and other points of interest. Your game board is a Rand McNally road map of the United States, and your trophies are postcards that you pick up along the way. The game gives you a choice of starting points. You click on a spinner to see how many miles you get to travel during each turn. If you’re lucky, you get to fly--a definite competitive advantage.

The software gives each player a list of five postcards to pick up. Beginners are given clues, but those who identify themselves as “licensed drivers” are on their own. That puts those of us who know a thing or two about U.S. geography on a more equitable level with the little ones.

Each time you arrive at a city, you hear some cheerful music and a greeting such as “Welcome to Massachusetts, the Bay State.” You also get to see as many as four postcards from around the state. Each card has an “info-button” that tells a little story about the scene.

Unfortunately, the information given doesn’t help you win. If it did, my kids would be more likely to read up on the various sites. Now they just look at the pictures and move on. Even so, they can’t help learning at least a little about geography, distances between cities and many of the wonderful sights that this country has to offer. My kids are delighted when they see a postcard from somewhere they’ve been on a real trip.

William, 8, who’s quite adept at computer games, isn’t much impressed with this program, but Travelrama is one of the few games that my daughter, Katherine, 11, thoroughly enjoys. That didn’t surprise the folks at Sanctuary Woods, who say the program is especially attractive to girls who tend to shy away from the shoot-’em-up type games. Even my wife, Patti, is impressed--a rare event when it comes to computer games--by the music and scenery.

When my kids aren’t traveling the virtual highways of America, they’re keeping cool under the sea playing Operation Neptune ($35 to $45). This Mac and Windows game, intended for children between 10 and 14 years old, teaches pre-algebra skills that include adding, subtracting, dividing and multiplying, and it also includes graphs, charts and percentages.

It also requires some hand-eye coordination to navigate the submarine around obstacles and to shoot some sea creatures before they rob you of oxygen. In other words, there’s an ample dose of arcade-style play mixed in with the mathematical learning. No wonder William loves it.

The players’ goal is to collect pieces from the unmanned Galaxy spacecraft that has crashed into the sea. As you travel around in a mini-submarine in search of space debris, you encounter both friendly and hostile sea creatures. You shoot the hostile ones with your ink pellets, and you nuzzle up to the friendly dolphin to get extra oxygen.

Every once in a while, you’re rudely interrupted by the mother ship, which requires you to answer a math problem before you go on. If you don’t get it right the first time, you get some hints. If you still get it wrong, the program shows you how to solve the problem.

Many of the math problems are too complicated for kids to figure out in their heads, so the program offers a calculator that makes it easy to do the arithmetic. This feature can be turned off by the parent or sophisticated kid, but, frankly, I think it’s a good idea because it allows the child to focus on the mathematical concepts rather than on the arithmetic.

Speaking of travel, I have a new place for you to visit this summer if you have access to the Internet or an on-line service that lets you cruise the World Wide Web. I’d be delighted to have you stop by my “home page” (https://www.omix.com/magid). You will find some of my articles, a chance to see the face behind the column and an opportunity to give me some feedback.

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Lawrence J. Magid can be reached at magid@latimes.com on the Internet.