Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. Review: DK Eyewitness Encyclopedia of Science Version 3
Iain Laskey examines the updated version of DK's venerable science extravaganza.
| Product | DK Eyewitness Encyclopedia of Science Version 3 |
|---|---|
| Company | GSP/Avanquest |
| Web | www.gspsoftware.co.uk |
| Price | £9.99 |
| We like | Periodic Table, updated content |
| We don't like | dated presentation, Vista installation |
| Rating | 7/10 |
| Requirements | Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/Vista |
We recently looked at the updated Version 2 of the Encyclopedia of Space and the Universe and were rather under whelmed by its dated interface, installation problems on Vista and lack of sufficiently updated content. Unfortunately, this update to its companion title, the DK Eyewitness Encyclopedia of Science Version 3 shares much of the same problems so expect poor videos and image quality, your screen being forcefully resized to 800x600 and the overall feeling you've just stepped back in time to a previous generation or two of multimedia presentation. You may want to check that review for more details.
However, in this instance, we felt rather warmer towards the DK Eyewitness Encyclopedia of Science Version 3 because somewhat more care seems to have been taken on updating the content and as we browsed the information, we found many examples of clearly updated text and dates in the articles.
This title as a whole seemed to have had a bit more thought on presentation too. For instance, it features a rather good periodic table which allows you to click on any element to find out more about its properties and even where its name came from. The whole chemistry section was quite good with nice clear explanations of how the table is broken down into different types of elements, how they behave as well as more detailed explorations on the different aspects of the subject. We thought the inclusion of a mathematics section was a good idea as most science resources at this level tend to stick to the trio of Chemistry, Physics and Biology.
There are also lots of videos and images as before but as noted, they really look spectacularly bad compared to modern expectations and anyone raised on a diet of web pages adorned with high quality videos and full quality photos will wonder what's hit them. In most cases they do tend to get the idea over though which is the main idea after all.
Whilst you can just explore the 900,000 odd words of text via the graphical interface, it's generally a lot quicker to go straight to the table of contents for specific items. We found a lot of interesting articles we'd otherwise have missed by wandering around exploring things though so both methods of access have their rewards and it was all too easy to find yourself jumping from one article to another related one and ending up somewhere quite unexpected.
This title is really aimed at younger audience, say 12 and up and the box heavily promotes its support for the National Curriculum, particularly learning about life processes, branches of mathematics, energy, electricity, motion, waves and so on. Everything is based around the four core areas of maths, chemistry, life sciences and physics. The articles are all pitched accordingly and if you want more in depth information, you would want to partner the Encyclopedia of Science with a resource such as Wikipedia. The information here is partnered with three and a half hours of audio, 80 animations and 40 (small and low res) video clips so isn't all words and pictures (800 of those too).
Conclusion
As with the updated Encyclopedia of Space and the Universe, we really think this is a missed opportunity and so much more could have been done to modernise this once landmark title but at least the content is more timely in this instance so we're offering a significantly higher rating. For instance, this one correctly has Pluto as a dwarf planet - the other Space and the Universe title still had it as a normal planet. The articles in general have slightly more depth too but still managed to be punchy and memorable making the DK Eyewitness Encyclopedia of Science Version 3 a useful addition when revising or just trying to increase your general knowledge across the sciences.
