Widget Workshop: A Mad Scientist's Laboratory is a hands-on science kit, for use on the computer and off. It was released in 1995

1995 in video gaming

-Events:*May 11 – Introduction of trade magazine GameWeek *May 11-16 — The 1st annual Electronic Entertainment Expo is held in Los Angeles, California...

 and is one of the more obscure Maxis

Maxis

Maxis is an American company founded as an independent video game developer in 1987. It is currently a subsidiary of Electronic Arts . Maxis is the creator of one of the best-selling computer games of all time, The Sims and its first sequel, The Sims 2...

 products. It was designed by Lauren Elliott

Lauren Elliott

Lauren Roosevelt Elliott is an American video game designer, internet entrepreneur, publisher and inventor...

, co-author of the Where in the World is Carmen SanDiego

Carmen Sandiego

Carmen Sandiego is a media franchise of educational computer and video games, television programs, books and other media featuring a thieving villain of the same name. The basic premise of the franchise lets the user or protagonists become agents of the ACME Detective Agency, who attempts to thwart...

game series.

The game has two main modes. Much like in The Incredible Machine, users can solve a variety of puzzles using a limited selection of parts or tinker with the freeform mode. Widget Workshop focuses more on the freeform mode than the other game.

Unlike the Rube Goldberg

Rube Goldberg

Reuben Garrett Lucius Goldberg was an American cartoonist, sculptor, author, engineer and inventor.He is best known for a series of popular cartoons depicting complex gadgets that perform simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways. These devices, now known as Rube Goldberg machines, are similar to...

 nature of The Incredible Machine, the parts in Widget Workshop are not mechanical or physical. Items include display boxes, graphing windows, random number generators, and mathematical tools ranging from addition and subtraction to Boolean logic gates and trigonometric functions. The arrangement of the items on screen doesn't matter, but the connections do: a numerical constant box could be connected to a mathematical function; connected to a graph, which would display a horizontal line; input as a color value on an RGB monitor; or even used to trigger a sound effect.

Quotes

"I can honestly say that this program is one of the coolest pieces of software I have ever used" - Macworld

Macworld

Macworld is a web site and monthly computer magazine dedicated to Apple Macintosh products. It is published by Mac Publishing, which is headquartered in San Francisco, California...

 review.

External links

• Widget Workshop at MobyGames
  MobyGames
  -Platforms not yet included:- Further reading :* Rusel DeMaria, Johnny L. Wilson, High Score!: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games, McGraw-Hill/Osborne Media; 2 edition , ISBN 0-07-223172-6...
  
  
• Promotional video (from the Internet Archive
  Internet Archive
  The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
  
  )