Letter World

Letter World is a children's educational shareware game by Matt Keith of Keith Productions, designed to help kids ages 3-8 learn associations between letters and the words and pictures they represent. This Mactrove entry corresponds to version 2.0 of the game (letter-world-20.hqx); an earlier 1.9.8 alpha (letter-world-198a.hqx) survives in Info-Mac's edu/yng/ directory.

What it teaches

The core loop is letter-and-word association: kids see a letter, hear it, and connect it with a sample word and picture. The author describes it as designed primarily for ages 3 to 8 but adds, with characteristic 1990s shareware warmth, that everyone is welcome to play. The game runs in black and white but is, in the author's words, "a lot snappier" in color, with a noticeable nifty factor for the kids.

Multilingual 2.0 update

The 2.0 release was a substantial expansion. It added support for English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Danish - giving the game six-language coverage from a single Mac shareware author - and packed in more words, more pictures, and more sounds than previous versions. Earlier 1.9.8 was an explicit alpha; 2.0 was the first "famous children's game" stable release per the author's own subject line.

System requirements and provenance

Letter World needs at least 1.5 MB of RAM and 4.1 MB of disk space, and is compatible with most Macintosh systems running System 6 or later with enough RAM. Distributed as shareware by Keith Productions (keith@www.keithcom.com, http://www.keithcom.com/keithprod) and mirrored here from the Info-Mac archive. Not currently listed on Macintosh Garden.