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I will describe good software that I find for the BBC Micro here, and will update it as I add new games. There are currently about 10 games on my 'worthwhile' list, the first of which is described below. I will also add links to the disk images, if anyone wants to try them in an emulator.
This disk is a compilation put together by a Ashby Primary School, probably in the UK.
This is a game of deduction played on a grid of 7x7 squares. A blue 4x4 square is hidden somewhere on the grid. The player chooses one tile at a time on the grid, revealing either a blue tile if they have found part of the square, or a red tile otherwise. When the player thinks they know where the square is, they can guess by entering the bottom left and top right grid positions that define it.
There's a whole lot of stuff that this game teaches kids, starting with grid-coordinates using numbers (1-7 on the Y-axis) and letters (A-G on the X-axis). I've shown an example of a revealed square in a grid to help visualise the words below.
1 . . . , . . .
2 . . X X X X .
3 . . X X X X .
4 , , X X X X ,
5 . . X X X X .
6 . . . , . . .
7 . . . , . . .
a b c d e f g
The size of the square, at 4x4, is chosen to be less than half the size of the grid (7x7), therefore the grid's centre lines always contain part of the square, and the centre tile is always part of the square.
This means there many deductive rules to observe. Trying the centre square is always a waste of a move. Finding the extents of the square on the centre lines is a good strategy. Trying tiles diagonally from a known tile can yield more knowledge than trying adjacent tiles.
There are also situations where the square could be in one of two positions, and therefore it's worth guessing rather than wasting a turn determining a tile, since you have a 50/50 chance of winning on that turn.
It's impressive how many quite fundamental ways of thinking can be squashed into such a simple, but well considered, game. There is also a game to discover a 4x3 (or 3x4) rectangle instead of a square, which adds different rules of deduction to be observed and learned.
I found it easy to get my kids into this game. A high-score is kept of the fewest turns taken to identify the square, so there's a competitive element.
A game to practise and test basic arithmetic. The theme is to make it across a jungle by answering questions on addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. These are chosen in advance of the game, and you also get to choose the size of answers (i.e. up to 10, 100, or 1000), and whether they should include negatives and/or decimals.
You can set the time limit within which a questions should be answered, and though I'm not a fan of ticking clocks in education, I can understand why they are there. It's possible to set it to five minutes, which is plenty, though my youngest was properly amused to set the game to the hardest level with the shortest time limit for me to play. The time challenge was quite fun I suppose.
When you get a question wrong, there are blocky animations of what gruesome fate awaits your character, all in comical 8-bit clunkiness. Even growing up with GPUs and fast processors, my kids seem to be amused by these animations.
Again, the simplicity is key here. It's easy to set the level of difficulty in order to practise something specific - e.g. subtracting negatives, or showing that adding with decimals is no different to any other addition.
NOTE there's a bug of sorts in this game - it was written (in 1982!) under BASIC V.1, but something with floating-points changed in BASIC V.2 causing some rounding errors. I have fixed this, but have still to submit it to the Educational Software Archive (who, in a weird coincidence is also the author of this game!).
In a very similar vein to Jungle Maths, this game is about practising converting fractions to decimals and percentages. There are four levels of difficulty, and four time limit settings for answers, and you get to choose whether the child is converting to decimals or percentages (i.e. there are no mixed questions).
On moderate difficulty, you might get fractions like 5/8, on the hardest level you get crazy stuff like 29/40, which I suppose can be fun if you like mental arithmetic torture. There's no lower bound to how difficult the questions can be, so you can get asked to convert 1/4 in hard mode straight after converting a fraction with prime numerator and denominator! I guess you'd be glad of the respite.
If you answer all the questions correctly, you get to play a simple shooting game to blow up spaceships that are shooting at you.
One thing that I want to fix is, when you get a question wrong three times, the response is "NO! The correct answer is ...". A bit shouty, so I removed this as a bug :) I also toned down "WRONG!" to just "Wrong" because, unlike Jungle Maths, the excercise and game are quite separate in Astro Maths, and there's no need for uppercase drama in a nice sedate excercise. Uppercase characters carry more meaning in our current SHOUTY AGGRESSIVE INTERWEBS!
My other posts on the BBC Micro