Rusty and Rosy review at the Homeschool Buyers Co-op

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Rusty and Rosy Learn with Me^®

Following is an unpaid review of Rusty and Rosy Learn with Me by MaryAnna Cashmore, a Review Editor with Homefires:

Co-op Note: Shortly after we launched the GroupBuy for Rusty & Rosy, we asked noted homeschooler Diane Flynn Keith if she or someone on her team would be willing to write a review. The assignment went to MaryAnna Cashmore. We are grateful to Diane and MaryAnna for the review published below. While MaryAnna like many features of Rusty & Rosy, she raised a number of concerns that we felt deserved a response from the Wateford Institute, the maker of Rusty & Rosy. With MaryAnna's permission, we have embedded Waterford's responses in the appropriate sections of the review, shown in blue.

My kindergartner has fallen in love with Rusty and Rosy. She wants to play with them every day. After using this program for less than a month, her reading and writing ability have taken a giant leap forward.

If you have a small child (age 4-6) in your home, these two adorable raccoons, impressively animated with 3D CGI, will dance and sing their way into his or her heart.

As a parent, I was impressed with the progressive teaching and reinforcement of basic concepts of the alphabet, phonics, number sense, basic mathematical operations, and even some science. Activities and lessons include high-interest stories, fun interactive games, multiple writing/creativity opportunities, beautiful high-quality songs and other audio, captivating animations, entertaining lectures, and more, all tailored to each child's current skill set.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the content includes stories from around the world, brief exposure to various foreign languages, a daily calendar and weather exercise, and even handwriting (printing) practice. It is designed to cover Math, Science, and Language arts up through second grade. There are a LOT of lessons and activities here!

Things people might like to know:

1. PRIVACY. The company retains all information about your child's name, age, grade level, ethnicity, gender, and the fact that your child is a homeschooler. This program does keep track of details about your child's usage of this program for the company's research purposes. The only information that the program actually needs for it to work properly is your child's approximate age and/or grade. You might want to be informed of the information being collected and how it will be used and how long it will be kept and with whom it will be shared. You might want to contact the company and opt out of their information collection and research, or request that the company delete all information collected about your child which is not necessary to that child's current usage of the program, or that they not retain it past the expiration of your child's website subscription.

Waterford: Waterford is a research organization and we collect this data as part of our ongoing effort to create the best educational technologies for early learners. Waterford does have a privacy policy that protects all information we collect and we are happy to address any specific concerns you have.

2. ACCESSIBILITY. This program does not provide accessibility for deaf children or parents; if enough parents request this, they might include this feature in a future version.

3. ACCOMODATION. The Waterford Institute welcomes feedback and is eager to provide phone support. They WANT to hear your questions and suggestions. There might be upgrades and improvements if enough people voice the opinion that such changes need to be made. So, the more people call them, the better for everyone.

4. TECH NOTES. We did encounter a few technical difficulties when test-driving this program, although apparently there is a newer version coming out which addresses the worst of those. Here are what we encountered:

a) PROGRESS REPORTS. Progress reports are available in Progress Manager, but these are not at all detailed. When I tested this feature, I repeatedly saw a message saying that there was not yet enough information to evaluate my child. The only way to get more detailed reports on the child's progress is through the printouts that will be automatically generated during gameplay. If printing is enabled, though, progress reports are not the only things that will be printed. The only choice you get is whether you want the printing enabled or disabled; you don't get to choose what gets printed. Make sure the printer is on and there is plenty of ink and paper loaded. The company recommends that, if the printer is not enabled, you get screenshots of the relevant progress reports during gameplay by use of a free downloadable screen capture utility called SnagIt, available online. (They didn't provide a link, but it was easy enough to find using an internet search engine.) According to the SnagIt documentation, use of this utility would require the keyboard, which is disabled during gameplay. I didn't go through the download and installation process necessary to try their recommendation. Feel free to try it yourself if you like.

Waterford: Progress reports are available at any time in the Rusty and Rosy Manager. Should you want to capture the reports, you can use a screen capture tool (like a print screen keyboard command or a commercial tool like SnagIt). Printout certificates and worksheets are also available to your child as he or she works in the program (if you allow printing). The Rusty and Rosy Manager also provides hundreds of worksheets you can print and use offline.

b) PREVIEWING. Lessons can be previewed if you call the company and request the special instructions which will enable you to configure the program to enable a special key combination that you can use to skip through from one lesson to another during gameplay. Lessons can also be previewed by registering yourself as a fictitional student (you can enroll up to five students; you can also erase all progress for any student and start back at the beginning of the chosen level at any time.) Right now the program is entirely automated, so all you do is start it up and all the lesson decisions are made for you. This is very easy to use, but some parents might like more say in what is presented to their child. Right now, parents can choose from Level One, Level Two, and Level Three, but the child is more precisely placed within the level based on their performance on the tests build into the program. When you initiate the program, you will be supplied with a special webpage with parental information such as supplemental worksheets (in pdf format) which you can print out for each lesson. This will give you some idea of the material covered in each lesson. When the new homeschool guide comes out, it should be helpful in deciding if there is any lesson or activity that you would want your child to skip.

Waterford: Rusty and Rosy is built to run without any need for intervention or assistance. We understand that some parents may want to preview lessons and skip through activities. We can provide you with a way to do this, but it is not a supported feature in the product which means it may compromise your child’s experience in receiving the recommended path through the curriculum. The homeschool guide does not have a planned release date at this time; however the scope of skills charts on our website provides detailed lists of the lessons your child will be learning. These can be found online at: http://www.rustyandrosy.org/features.html.

c) VOLUME CONTROL. The keyboard is completely disabled during gameplay. This means that if you are depending on your keyboard for volume control, printer control, access to real-time error messages, toolbar display, control-alt-delete, escape, arrow keys, correcting an error in typing in an answer, and so forth, you will have to learn to get used to not having any of that functionality. The volume must be controlled by the knob on external speakers or else it must be adjusted prior to starting the program. (In the paperwork that comes with the program, headphones are also listed as optional equipment; personally I would hesitate to hook such a young child up with a pair of headphones since then there is no way to know how loud the program might get. The volume fluctuates during gameplay; this is another reason that I would consider it imperative to have an external non-keyboard means of controlling the volume.) An alternative to exterior volume control would be devoting one computer exclusively for the Rusty and Rosy game, with the volume permanently left at an ideal setting.

Waterford: The navigation and controls assume that a very young child will be working independently on the computer. For that reason, Rusty and Rosy plays as a full screen and does not allow the child to easily navigate away from the program to access system controls such as volume control.

Why? In Waterford Institute's research lab, we have observed hundreds of young children needlessly wasting time in complex or poor software navigation. We want parents to be confident their child is always working productively.

d) REQUIRED LESSON TIME. You cannot see on the screen how much time remains to your child's lesson and whether or not "free play" has been unlocked for the day.

e) FIND THE MOUSE POINTER. You cannot use the mouse while audio and animations are playing. (The way it is right now, in some activities it can be frustrating to have to keep relocating the mouse pointer every few seconds, or to have to wait through a long audio explanation before being allowed to indicate the answer.)

Waterford: This intentional design helps children to listen to instructions before clicking responses. Based on hundreds of observations in the Waterford Institute lab, the program is designed to ensure that children have enough information to demonstrate their knowledge. Keep in mind that every response is important to the automatic sequencing.

f) MOUSE MOTION SETTINGS. The program requires the child to use such extremely tiny mouse movements so that they will be less likely to reach the edge of the mousepad. The game already ships with a slightly larger mousepad and the company recommends that you limit your child's screen time to 10-30 minutes per session. (Will that suggestion be enough to keep you and your child from developing wrist injury? I hope so. Ouch.) The company recommends changing the computer's global mouse settings in order to increase the mouse movements used during gameplay; this is another reason why you might want to designate one of your home computers exclusively to Rusty and Rosy gameplay and not use it for any other purpose. (On Windows 2000 or XP you would go into "my computer" and find the mouse settings, then adjust it so that the child can use a larger range of motion).

Waterford: Keep in mind that mouse settings are unique to your computer. We do recognize that young children may need different settings than the other computer users in your family. However, like nearly all software programs, Rusty and Rosy does not adjust those settings.

g) TWO USB JACKS. This was a bit puzzling at first. You will want to plug in both of the USB jacks, so you will need two available USB ports on your computer.

h). FIREWALL FREEZE FEST. In the version we were testing, the program froze immediately as soon as it was started up. To get it to run, the firewall had to be instructed to allow a couple of obscure java applications to communicate freely with each other via the internet. (The company has assured us that this problem has been fixed in the newest version. If you do still encounter this problem, though, you can always call the company and they will be glad to walk you through the fix).

Waterford: This issue has been resolved in the latest version of Rusty and Rosy. Should you encounter any difficulties, our Customer Service representatives quickly can resolve this for you.

i). REPEATING A LESSON. The only way to backtrack prior to the current lesson is to completely reset your child back to the beginning of a level, which means that they lose all of their previous progress and must go through every single one of the lessons again. To make this more palatable, the company recommends that you register one or more fictional children. You can register up to 5 children in one family. If you don't have five in your family within the target age range, you can have more flexibility of jumping ahead and back. (This works better if you use the "skip to the next lesson" functionality described earlier, available from the company by request.)

Waterford: The curriculum in Rusty and Rosy is carefully sequenced. As your child progresses, the program monitors your child’s responses and automatically determines what to do next. With Rusty and Rosy, it’s as if your child has a very well-trained tutor working through a research-based curriculum.

Why? A core philosophy at Waterford Institute is that we will capture the very best education and deliver it to every child. Leading experts from universities across the U.S. consulted on Waterford curriculum. We packaged their recommendations to alleviate that burden from busy teachers and parents.

j). NO SIMULTANEOUS USAGE. Although you can register up to five children in one family, the program depends on its external hard drive in order to run. This means that only one person can use the program at any given time. If you want several children to use the program at once, you could either gather them all around the same computer, or buy several copies of this program.

k). SHRINKING EULA. Keep your magnifying glass handy during installation. In the version of this program that I saw, the End User License Agreement is in tiny, light grey font and cannot be resized or printed out or pasted into another document for easier reading. This may have been fixed in the latest updated version.