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Zoombinis are the main creatures in a series of educational software made by The Learning Company designed for child education. The Learning Company recommends the game for children only at and after age 8. Some elementary school math textbooks feature pictures of Zoombinis.

Near the beginning of each game, the player has the ability to select a party of Zoombinis by choosing characteristics for the Zoombinis like eyes/glasses, hair/hats, nose color, and shoes/means of locomotion. The party of Zoombinis travels through a series of puzzles, which the player must solve to proceed. These puzzles often depend on the characteristics of the Zoombinis, for example matching Zoombinis with the same characteristics and none left over.

Sometimes a player can complete a puzzle, but not well enough to take all the Zoombinis on to the next puzzle, for example by experimenting too much. The remaining Zoombinis go to the last resting place. Resting places appear periodically on the Zoombinis' journeys usually about every fourth puzzle. When a player reaches a resting place, he can choose to leave his party of Zoombinis there and return to a resting place that he has already gone including the beginning one.

Creatures

Zoombinis

The Zoombinis are small, round, blueish creatures who have four distinct alterable features- Hair, Eyes, Nose, and feet. The zoombinis have no arms or hands. Each of the four Zoombini features are drastically different from Zoombini to Zoombini-- For example, one may wear rollerblades over two feet, while another Zoombini might have no feet at all and instead have a propeller which keeps him or her airborne.

Boolies

The Boolies are creatures from the Zoombinis: Mountain Rescue game who can either be happy or sad. Their name is derived from Boolean logic, a kind of logic that has two states that is used extensively inside computers.

Fleens

The Fleens are, in many ways, similar to the Zoombinis, as they too also feature different noses, hair, eyes, and feet. However, they are portrayed as the "evil" parallel race of the Zoombinis.

The Fleens are also rumored to be the Zoombinis' distant cousins.

Norfs

The Norfs are creatures from the Zoombinis: Mountain Rescue game. Norfs either live or play under the snow, surfacing to get in the way of Zoombinis while they attempt to carefully snowboard a specific route on the mountain. They also pester the Zoombinis to give them exactly what they want for lunch out of a selection of fish, sandwiches, salads, milk, orange juice, tea, ice cream, watermelon, and pie.

Zoombinis: Logical Journey

The game is intended to teach children reasoning and logic skills. The user creates characters from the Zoombini race, and brings them to a new settlement. After selecting a party of Zoombinis you can solve a variety of puzzles which get harder as you get more and more Zoombinis to their final resting home.

In one of the levels the Fleens confront the Zoombinis and chase them up trees. The player has to correctly determine which three Zoombinis correspond to the three Fleens that are stationed on a branch containing a bee hive; when all three are provoked into chasing the Zoombinis, the bee hive will open and the bees will chase the Fleens away.

System requirements

PC

Macintosh

Zoombinis: Mountain Rescue

The game uses the Boolie characters to teach how binary values are stored in computers, replicating up to four bits (a nibble) at a time. Only addition is shown, never any other operation.

Players have to try to change a series of boolean "Boolies" from random mood states (happy or sad) into a pattern of all happy by adding integer values to the series. When they are all happy, they make their way to a ship that carries them to their promised land: Booliewood. After they've all made their way home, the grand Boolie Boolie returns and the game has been won.

Zoombinis: Island Odyssey

External links

Educational computer and video games | Mac OS games | Windows games

Zoombinis

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Zoombinis".

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