1. In World Book Kids, I looked at the "Science Projects." This section has some good experiment ideas. Some are quite simple and basic (seeing how the amount of sunlight differs between the equator and the polar regions), while others are a little more involved (testing how yeast works or growing crystals). These ideas could be useful for elementary teachers or home school parents to get their students interested in science and how things work.
2. In the Student edition, I looked at "Quizzes and Activities" and went into the "Trivia Quizzes" section. I tried a couple of the quizzes there--did well on some and not so well on others. These quizzes might be really useful for students to try after studying different units of history, science, etc. There is a lot there that I didn't know!
3. In the E-book Center of World Book Advanced, I looked up "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." At first, I thought the tool to be able to translate to another language would be really useful for a student whose first language is not English but who needs to read a book for say, a literature class, or for someone who is trying to learn another language. However, I can't verify the accuracy/readability of any of these languages because I don't know any other language well. So, I printed off "The Tale of Peter Rabbit" in both English and Korean and asked some Korean friends about the translation. The Korean friends I checked with agreed that the Korean translation of the story is "bad." One said it would be very confusing to a person whose native language is Korean and who is trying to learn English. The sentence structure is incorrect (they use a different word order than English) and some of the words are translated oddly. Apparently the translation is just a literal word translation which does not adjust for context, sentence structure, etc. I cannot verify the correctness of any of the other languages in the translate feature, but I would be suspect of their accuracy as well. On another note, being able to click into other articles via the Related Information would also be helpful, as is the "How to cite this article" note at the bottom of the page. All of this information would be useful to students doing papers, projects, etc.
4. Regarding the World Book Discover assignment, I work at a library and am not a teacher, so I don't have students to be able to say which features would suit them best. However, using the Dictionary, I tried looking up a word that I didn't know how to spell (onomatopoeia). Unfortunately, I wasn't able to guess correctly and it doesn't give you "Did you mean ....?" with the correct spelling. So, I went into Dictionary.com and was given some alternatives and was able to find the correct spelling. (I really wasn't too far off in my attempts.) Even more unfortunately, when I copied and pasted the correct spelling into the World Book dictionary, it said there were no matching entries. I also tried out the Atlas feature. It gives maps according to country, and on some it has additional features (population density, rainfall averages, etc.) for the continents. These would be useful for students doing reports or studying particular parts of the world.
Welcome back to another round of the Challenge, nilyni! Sorry you did not have luck in Discover's dictionary. All World Book modules have the "double-click" dictionary--double-click on a word and the dictionary pops up. This feature is probably more useful than the dictionary section by itself. As for the translation tool, it is computer, not human, generated, so it is not as context-sensitive as a human's translation would be. Still, it is probably better than nothing. We think the read-aloud feature in the ebooks is valuable, as are--as you note--the addition resources. Student's trivia quizzes are not as easy as they sound! The idea, of course, is that you would use World Book to find the answers. Promoting these resources to home school parents is a great idea. Thanks for your good work here.
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