Kat's Classic Macs

After a reasonably good experience with the 1st grade version of Smart Steps, I noticed that the program is one of a series and bought the Kindergarten version. This CD seemed to be working fine, but then we noticed none of the students' individual names and progress were being saved. Worse, on some Macs the game crashes when you finish the first activity, right at the time it would normally write the progress to the disk.

No luck contacting the publisher and no relevant info on web sites. I didn't expect much since the program seems to be selling in bargain bins. Poking around I noticed a newer date on the application program, and clear evidence the program was malfunctioning when attempting to write into its data folder. It also has a "FileIOXtraPPC" which the 1st grade version does not.

For now we can use Smart Steps Kindergarten in guest mode, not saving the students' names and progress. It does appear that a patch was made, and there is reason to believe an earlier version of the program might work better in MacOS 9. If you have one where the application date is earlier than 2002, please contact me!

Update: we discovered a workaround for the problem by accident: Just be sure to press the Return key after typing your name! There is no instruction to do this and no indication at the time that it makes any difference, but doing this causes the name and progress to be saved properly.

A student had somehow gotten her name into the program. She could not explain what she did, so we asked her to use the program on another Mac, and as we watched she typed in her name and pressed Return as if by habit. That's how the problem got solved!