Number Squares

This is the beginning of the Number Squares blog. Number Squares is some commercial Apple II educational software I co-designed with Dave Lyons in 1989. This software is now free and can be run in emulation mode on Windows computers (using the free emulator AppleWin) or on Mac OS X computers (using the $19 emulator named Virtual II. Virtual II works very well on my G3 iBook. It requires Mac OS 10.3.9 or higher.)

A 6-minute combo screencast video explaining about this software has been created. This file is about 90 megabytes in file size.

In 1992, Number Squares received a 5 out of 5 rating from software evaluators in the Iowa City Community School District. The same school district nominated this software for the annual educational software guidebook, Only the Best, published by R.R. Bowker.

While this software was designed for 3rd and 4th graders, children as young as 3 years old seem to enjoy playing these logic puzzles. Some older students enjoy the puzzles, too.

You can download a disk image of the Number Squares puzzles here. This small download includes the open source, free AppleWin emulator software. AppleWin runs fine under Windows 98 and Windows XP. It probably also works well under Windows 2000.

If you have feedback or useful information to add to this blog, kindly send email to me with the subject Number Squares. Phil Shapiro, pshapiro@his.com


A related project I've been working on is a blog and combo screencast video of the Simple SokoMind logic puzzles.

And here are some thoughts of mine on Designing Educational Software..

Information about other creative projects I'm involved with can be found on my Protopage and in stories I've submitted to Digg.