Test Drive: iQuest: Interactive Talking Handheld

Motivating fifth- through eighth-grade students to study is always a challenge. The iQuest Interactive Talking Handheld by LeapFrog is an electronic learning aid that may entice some of your most resistant students to do just that.

Slightly larger than Nintendo's Gameboy, the iQuest has a three-inch screen and a mini-keyboard. With a built-in address book, scheduler, dictionary, notepad, and calculator, the iQuest is more a PDA than a gaming device. It offers optional plug-in cartridges to use with its Chapter Challenge and Pop Quiz programs, and provides review questions for chapters of major math, science, and social studies textbooks.

To use these supplemental programs, plug in one of the data cartridges, press the power button, and use the directional arrow key to select the timed Pop Quiz or the more thorough Chapter Challenge. While both features indicate correct and incorrect answers, Chapter Challenge provides hints if a wrong answer is selected, encouraging kids to rethink their answers and not just guess. A supplied cartridge offers generic questions for each subject area and grade level, but I found the optional subject- and textbook-specific cartridges more useful. These cartridges contain questions coordinated with common textbooks from publishers such as Glencoe, McDougal Littell, and Prentice Hall. The iQuest, like other Leapfrog products, uses voice and sound to provide directions and background music. A volume control and a headphone jack let students use headphones and keep the sound under control in the classroom. The iQuest, though, doesn't offer a feature that reads the questions aloud, so that poor readers could benefit.

A few iQuests in the classroom or available through the library media center would make sense, especially with question-and-answer cartridges that match your school's textbooks. Yet the real value of iQuests depends on how teachers make use of them. For example, pairs of students might play hangman, using an iQuest to supply questions they must answer correctly in order to make a move. Or kids could use Chapter Challenge's social studies questions to preview a textbook chapter. With list prices of $59.95 for the iQuest unit and $14.95 for each subject cartridge, the iQuest is an affordable classroom aid.