Cheap JumpStart Advanced 1st Grade (Software) (Macintosh, Windows) Price

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Customer Reviews of JumpStart Advanced 1st Grade

Good Educational Product
If you are using this for educational purposes, you need to go to the parent options portion of the software. I had my son and daughter take the assessment test. You can see how they do on the leveling section. Then if you go to the Report card, you can select what you want your child to work on. There are LOTS of options to pick from, sentence building, syllables, parts of speech, addition, subtraction, money, earth science, and on. I could really zone in on what my son was not good at, parts of speech, (identifing noun, verb, adjective) and sentence building. He kept scoring low on money also, but he would say it was easy. I watched him and realized he wasn't picking the largest coins first. Once he did that his score improved. I think the software is a great tool, BUT the parents have to spend a little time each day selecting which section of the software you want your child to do. Otherwise, they are just playing random games. But, picking out the sections only takes less than 1 minute. I am buying 2nd grade reading softwre today!

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DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT
This is by far the most poorly designed software I have ever purchased. I actually purchased this at Costco, but since they don't allow reviews on their site, I am writing it here. 1.) Terrible Install - I am running Windows XP and have two drives in my computer: a CD drive and a DVD drive. I initially installed on the CD drive, but then was unable to get the software to work since many of the dll files could not be seen since the software wasn't smart enough to look at the drive it was installed from. I initially tried registering the dlls to no avail. Then I installed the software on the other drive. This finally worked. 2.) Unintuitive Interface - You are given a number of choices when you start, but you aren't told that you must go in a certain order. You end up starting games where you cannot do anything because you haven't passed some pre-requisite. There are very few mouse overs labels either, so you don't know what you are clicking until you actual click it. Obviously a child is not going to be able to read these, but I would think they would have them for the parent's sake. 3.) Bugs Galore - There were many instances where we started a game that just ended up not working properly. For example, there is a soccer game that asked you to pick the sound or word in a goal or soccer ball. Well, there was no letters to be displayed and even when you clicked on the items nothing happened. 4.) Memory Leaks - Another thing that was made me pretty angry was the error that appears every time I close the program. It is a dialog with the title "Smart Heap Library" and has the message "MEM_BAD_POINTER". I am a software developer by trade and all I can say is that this kind of error has the potential to overwrite or corrupt files on your computer or crash your system. Needless to say, it was very frustrating for my son and I. Apparently this software has been out since 2002, so I assumed that any bugs had been worked out. I really don't know what to say about the quality assurance of this company, but I will be very cautious before I buy another product from them.

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Great Beginnings
I have a First Grader who has difficulty being taught anything by family members so Jump Start First Grade is great for him. The program was easy for him to use and he stayed with it for over an hour the first time he sat down with it. Now he loves it and asks to play all the time. He really lit up when I told him once he learned all the things on the cd he'd be one of the smartest kids in his class and be able to help some of the other kids. I wish I would have gotten this during the summer before he started first grade