In the sugary-sweet world of Strawberry Shortcake, youngsters explore the magical world of Strawberryland to find ingredients to bake cookies for a party. They surf down the River Fudge, gathering ingredients while avoiding taffy whirlpools and chocolate bubbles. There are cakes to build and decorate, too. Kids can also collect ingredients by helping Orange Blossom create pathways using candy canes, marshmallows, and the like. These pathways are used to roll oranges out of trees into waiting buckets.
Once children have collected enough ingredients, they go to the cookie-making factory to “bake” their collected ingredients into cookies.
While Strawberry Shortcake and her friends are appealing characters, there are only four activities in this software. The surf-the-River-Fudge and the decorate-the-cakes activities are very simple, and quickly become boring. The one about creating pathways for the oranges provides a good challenge in logical thinking, but it can be tricky for the age group targeted by this software. The cookie-making activity requires some trial and error (which is good), but kid-testers found the instructions confusing.
The software offers printable cookie recipes, but I would pull out your favorite cookbook instead of playing this sweet but unfulfilling software.
All tech products are judged on a five star scale by looking at the following factors: fun, education, ease of use, value, and technical.
