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The Worst Witch (Sherston)


Stig sold very well by the standards of educational software but it took two years to find another popular children's title to tackle. This is partly because there aren't actually that many books that absolutely every school tends to read, and those there are are not necessarily available for the software treatment - many authors still think their books will be turned into 'video games'. 'Still, after a lot of persuading, for which I have to thank Judi Moore and Di Pescod, Jill Murphy allowed me to give The Worst Witch the same treatment.

This was a slightly more simple adventure, aimed a little lower down the junior school. For instance, it is not possible to do anything within the game that will stop you from completing it and make you start again. Like Stig, it was closely tied in with the book, in fact it is not really possible to complete it without having read the book.


The parser in the software proved very popular with younger children as it is very tolerant of spelling errors and allows any number of words to be typed, rather than the strict verb-noun structure of some other adventures (so there!). On the BBC version, Dave Baxter did the drawings and produced a wonderful cut-away poster of the castle in the story, I braved !Paint to produce the A3000 graphics (except those shown here - Dave did the opening and closing screens). This package also gave me a chance to include the script of a short play about witches developed with the the class I was teaching at the time.


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