Number Names

About halfway through Stephen Hawking's The Universe in a Nutshell, as I lay curled in a fetal ball whimpering random non sequiturs concerning string theory, imaginary time and p-branes into the carpet (don't let the pretty coffee table graphics kid you, Hawking's latest is the intellectual equivalent of a half-nelson), I crawled over to the VCR, popped in the opening episode of the Star Maths series and was immediately gratified to discover three things I understood: units, tens and hundreds. Sporting sharp computer animation, Number Names finds youngsters Sam and Amber helping space pilot Lisa steer a cargo ship to their Uncle Zak's planetoid Junkiter. The unusual navigational system (which, believe me, is no weirder than current cosmological theories) requires the correct recognition of numbers out to three digits (units, tens, hundreds), a task the children are able to master with the aid of Numberella, a mathematical oracle. Unfortunately, the entertainment-to-instruction ratio here seems to be about 4-to-1, a ratio that hopefully declines in successive volumes of this otherwise solid introduction to primary math concepts. The other titles in the series are: Ordering Whole Numbers, Three-Digit Numbers, Counting By Tens, Counting By Hundreds, Fractions, Equivalent Fractions, Units of Time, Symmetry and Directions and Angles. Optional. Aud: K, E. (R. Pitman)