Message from jwyss

[Anonymous]

Ancient Origins. Marin Multimedia Limited/ Piranha Interactive Publishing, Inc.
1996-1998

Ancient Origins cd-rom is one of the best electronic resources I have come across. It is a top-notch resource for sixth grade social studies and covers the early part of the seventh grade social studies curriculum. It has some of best little bells and whistles I have seen and that includes web technology that is now ten years newer. Students can actually play ancient instruments, explore 3-D buildings, excavate archaeological sites, and interact with animations of everyday life. Many topics have a narrated introduction and interactive maps. One wishes that the great mass of information that is presented in text form were also narrated for they are really informative, but difficult to present to an audience in the format they are presented. That said, they are superb as a reference for the single user.

Ancient Origins covers the time period from 5,000,000 BCE to 500 CE. The Grand topics include Europe, West Asia, South Asia, East Asia, Africa, North America, Central America and South America, all of which can be accessed either on a time line or a large spinning globe.

The segment on East Asia and the Pacific is the one most cogent for this forum. The sections on Prehistoric Japan start with the late Paleolithic and stretches to the Yamato Period. The Jomon Period contains an interactive 3-D reconstruction of a Jomon village; one can also hear an early Japanese zither played. One of the last sections in this segment covers the early states of Japan and Korea from 500 BCE to 668 CE. Korea does get short shrift, but there is a wonderful interactive map of Korean history and a great animated panel of daily life.

Chinese history starts with Homo erectus and goes through the Han Dynasty. The section contains interactive maps and for Shang China one gets to excavate the Tomb of Fu Hao and play a Chinese mouth organ; for Zhou zeng bells can be played; in Qin one can excavate the Tomb of Qin Shji Huang Di and for Han the Tomb of Muwangdui. There are also interactive panels of everyday life for Zhou and Han.

I have had many pleasurable hours exploring this cd-rom and have used it in class as well. Students love the music sections and are enamored of the reconstructions and excavations and all want to get a chance to interact with the program. They are less attentive when it comes to the picture and textual portions that are not narrated. I choose these carefully and use the bookmark function because navigation in this section of the program is not particularly good. It is unfortunate that the cd-rom is out-of-print. However, one can sometimes find it used at Amazon