Podd is an educational game

Educational game

Educational games are games that have been designed to teach people about a certain subject, expand concepts, reinforce development, understand an historical event or culture, or assist them in learning a skill as they play...

 for the BBC Micro

BBC Micro

The BBC Microcomputer System, or BBC Micro, was a series of microcomputers and associated peripherals designed and built by Acorn Computers for the BBC Computer Literacy Project, operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation...

 and Acorn Electron

Acorn Electron

The Acorn Electron is a budget version of the BBC Micro educational/home computer made by Acorn Computers Ltd. It has 32 kilobytes of RAM, and its ROM includes BBC BASIC along with its operating system....

, published by Acornsoft

Acornsoft

Acornsoft was the software arm of Acorn Computers Ltd, and a major publisher of software for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron. As well as games, they also produced a large number of educational titles, extra computer languages and business and utility packages - these included ROM-based word...

 in 1984.

The eponymous main character teaches young users various verb

Verb

A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...

s, performing an appropriate animation when a recognised word is typed in.

The object of the game is to find the 120 verbs that Podd can recognise. Since the available RAM is too small for implementing 120 different animations, several words are mapped to one animation (e.g. "walk", "hike", "stroll", etc), and children who realise this will be able to guess more words by thinking of synonyms for the words that have already been discovered.

External links

• Article at the Lancashire Grid for Learning
• Back inlay and booklet transcription at RETROalphabet