I’m not a gamer. Never have been really. I was moderately interested in good old Mario Bros. for a time and could rock Galaga like there was no tomorrow in my early teen years. The only console I own is a Wii and that’s just because I won it. I did have a brief stint playing Starcraft but that’s pretty much it. Games haven’t been of much interest to me.
Lately we’ve been introducing Ava, the four year old, to computer games. We started with the basics, Reader Rabbit, Living books (Stellaluna is a favorite) and the like. Most of these games were given to us by family members which is great. Ava wiled away lots of time with these games. Eventually though she became bored with them.
Way back in February, otherwise known as the bowels of Michigan winter, I was looking for quality kids games that were affordable. I happened upon a contest PG was hosting and ended up winning that one too. Trust me, I’m not near as lucky as this post would lead you to believe. The prize in this contest was a copy of ItzaBitza.
ItzaBitza is fabulous software. It took Ava a few months to really get the hang of it. We would let her play for a bit at her own pace and for short amounts of time. Within the last several weeks she has really wrapped her head around how the game works and is having an absolute blast.
I’m not even crazy about calling it a game. It’s so much more than that. The interaction is unlike anything I’ve seen in a program for a child. Ava can move the mouse over the words in a sentence or instruction and the game reads them to her. This is helping her learn to read as well as improving her accuracy with the mouse. The game tasks her with drawing different things which often place the character into action. She can’t be lazy about it either. The game seems pretty good at detecting a scribble, and discarding it, when it was expecting a house or tree instead. The fun doesn’t end with drawing things either. The items that are drawn can be put into motion much of the time. Imagine a plane your child draws in the game flying across the sky with a simple shake of the mouse. Really excellent.
There have been plenty of reviews written for ItzaBitza so don’t feel like you need to take my word for anything. The software only costs $20 and there’s also a trial version available. Go ahead, kick the tires.




The initial interface loads a very calming aquarium scene. The menu along the bottom of the screen is done in classic macintosh style and presents easy links to Aquarium, Television, Games, Music and Stories. Each section displays a different skin with links to the associated content. In my testing, videos, music or stories were played without a hitch. One video link led to the Disney site (wrapped in the ZacBrowser interface) and I was concerned this may be a jumping off point to other places online. It seems the developers thought of this as each attempt to do anything other than play the selected video was met with no results.









