The screenshot shown on this page is the user interface designed for Mindforge Fractions, which was released in 1998. For this project, I served as the instructional designer, but we also had several graphic designers and animators, an audio engineer, a programmer, and a producer. This project was designed to teach basic fraction concepts to young children, so we chose images, colors, audio, and navigation appropriate for 5-9 year olds. This product was based on my graduate work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and predates all of the more recent research on the use of different media elements by Richard Mayer.
Much of what we employed in Mindforge Fractions was based on the current research of the day, but many of our choices were based on experience obtained in making educational games for Broderbund Software. In fact, my husband, Tom Wilcox, who produced Mindforge Fractions, was the user interface designer for the Deluxe Edition of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, which used high resolution National Geographic photography - something unheard of in the late 1980s - and sold millions of copies!
