I had a burst of math-fueled nostalgia earlier this week when I found out that one of my favorite ‘edu-tainment’ games from my childhood has just been re-released for modern systems, and I’d like to take this week’s Ellen’s Choice to tell you about it.

Allow me to introduce the Zoombinis.


“The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis” was a PC game back in the 1990’s that combined surprisingly challenging problem solving with adorable animations and catchy music to create an incredibly memorable experience. In the game you serve as a guide for the Zoombinis, a peaceful, fun-loving race of little blue creatures who need to escape persecution by traveling to a faraway utopia called ‘Zoombiniville.’ You guide the little guys in groups of 16, leading them through four different legs of the journey, each of which contains obstacles in the form of three different logic puzzles you must solve to get them past. As you get better at the puzzles the difficulty gets harder, so that it continues to be a challenge all the way through to the end (not that there really is much of an end; it can keep going until you’re out of Zoombinis in the starting area, and even then you can just make a new game or switch to ‘practice’ mode and keep puzzling!)

The Zoombinis have 5 options each of four different facial features (hair, eyes, noses, and feet), allowing for a multitude of different possible appearances (625 possibilities, to be exact!). Identical twins are allowed, but only two Zoombinis across any given play-through can share the same exact makeup, so you have to get creative. Roughly half of the problem-solving puzzles make use of this fact by involving various kinds of sorting and common-element algorithms, and part of what keeps the puzzles fresh is that each new group of 16 has very different characteristics in its makeup – you have to keep adapting your strategies to fit your current group. The puzzles are themed around comically-engaging premises, like stone guardians that only let certain kinds of Zoombinis through, an innkeeper who’s very picky about where everyone sleeps in her inn, or (one of my favorites) the Pizza Party, with three discerning tree trolls demanding very specific pizzas.

I loved Zoombinis as a kid and still had vivid memories of it, so when I heard it was re-released, I immediately plunked down my money and downloaded a copy. (It can be found on the App Store and Google Play, and their website says that desktop and Kindle Fire versions are coming a little later in the year.) And let me tell you – it’s gorgeous. They took the exact same designs from the 90’s version and painstakingly updated the graphics to use modern vector technologies (a la flash animation) without changing the designs at all. They re-used all the original music, voiceovers and sound effects – starting it up I had a sudden rush of emotion as the dialogue all came back to me, exactly as it was when I was little.

And you know what impresses me the most? It’s still an awesome game – even as an adult. I was concerned that since it was a game designed for kids, it might be too easy for me as an adult, but never fear – I spend just as much time yelping in frustration now as I did then! I love puzzle games, and I truly believe that getting kids interested in problem-solving is really important – a lot of my math tutoring turns out to be more about basic logic and problem-solving skills than actually doing math itself.

As an adult, I can see the places where Zoombinis mimics certain types of logic puzzles, cleverly camouflaged to fit in with the story. Remember I mentioned earlier that some of the puzzles make use of the range of possible combinations on the Zoombinis themselves? As an example, in the middle of the game there’s a puzzle where the Zoombinis need to hire a raftsman to pole them across a river. The raftsman is very picky about how they sit on his raft – each Zoombini must share at least one common feature with everyone he sits next to. It’s basically a sorting algorithm, and as the difficulty increases, the orientation of the seats on the raft shifts to give each Zoombini more and more neighbors to match with. As a kid, I remember solving this one by hacking the system – you can personalize your group of 16 Zoombinis exactly how you want it, so I used to make sure everyone in my group had one thing in common (they all had sunglasses, for example). If everyone shares one feature, they don’t have to worry about where they sit! I tried that after downloading the new version, and it still works, but now it feels a bit like cheating. So I’ve been having the game make random sets of 16 for me, and practicing my sorting skills by dealing with whatever distribution of features I get.

I highly recommend getting yourself a copy of this game, whether you enjoy puzzles or cute animations or even just cheesy dialogue spoken by a way-too-excited narrator. It’s a shining example of how learning can be fun, and how infusing learning into a game can get kids (and grown-ups too!) excited about the concepts involved.

Oh, and if you do get it, stick your tongue out at the Fleens for me!

On Friday my TV broke.

Kind of a bummer, but we’d had it for many years and it was time for it to go. Now we needed to get a new one, so we headed out to the store. In the process of our search, we realized that our old TV was at the extreme smaller end of the TVs they now sell, so we were going to need to buy a bigger one. We found one we liked, that was only slightly bigger than our old one. The big question, though, before we plunked down our hard-earned cash, was this: would it still fit on our entertainment center?

Our current TV was sold as a 40-inch model, and the one we liked was 43-inch. However, TVs are measured across the diagonal, not the width, so we needed to know what the actual width would be. My hubby got out a tape measure, and I got out a pencil and paper. He measured our 40-inch TV across the diagonal and found that 40 was actually just the screen size; the full diagonal with the frame was 42.5 inches. We knew the new one’s frame was no larger than this one, so we rounded it up to 3 extra inches and made the diagonal of the new one 46 inches – better to over-estimate than under-estimate. Hubby then measured across the width of the old TV and found that it was 36 inches. The question then became: how wide is the new TV?

I immediately realized that this was a similar triangles problem – TVs are rectangles, which means that the diagonal is the hypotenuse of a right triangle, and they all have the same proportions these days since everything’s in wide-screen. So I drew up two right triangles, labeled the sides accordingly, and set out to write up a proportion:

36/42.5 = x/46

I cross-multiplied:

42.5x = 1656

And then divided by 42.5:

x = 38.965

To find that the new TV would be ever-so-slightly shy of 39 inches across. Hubby measured the entertainment center and found that it was 41 inches across, so we’re safe!

I point this out for those of you who think you’ll never use any of the math you’re learning after you finish school. Math is everywhere, and having the ability to decipher a word problem and the techniques to follow up on it will help in all kinds of unusual situations. In fact, during the process my hubby pointed out that I could use the Pythagorean Theorem to figure out that third side of the TV, and I responded that yes, I could, but I actually don’t need to. I have two sides of the triangle and a corresponding side of the new one, and that’s all I needed to figure it out.

Narrative Point of View, sometimes called Narrative Perspective, describes the position of the narrator in relation to the story. Commonly-used points of view include First Person, where the narrator is a main character in the story, describing the events using “I,” and Third Person, where the narrator is a separate entity describing the events of the story using “he” or “she”. Within Third Person there are two sub-categories dealing with how much information the narrator chooses to give. Third Person Omniscient places the narrator above the story, where they can provide narration of events that the main characters are unaware of. A good example of this is the Harry Potter series, where the books sometimes show scenes of the Malfoys, Snape, or Voldemort – things that Harry and his friends would have no way of knowing about. In contrast, Third Person Limited places the narrator inside the main character’s head but not AS the main character – events are still described as “he did this” or “he thought that,” but only events or thoughts that the main character is aware of are introduced. Only the main character’s thoughts are given; everyone else’s motivations must be inferred from actions and dialogue. An example of this would be the Hunger Games trilogy, where Katniss is the lens through which we view the story. (Interestingly, the Hunger Games movies change this perspective, showing what was actually happening in the game-controllers’ room during the games, where in the books we only have Katniss’s ideas about what MIGHT be happening up there.)

These are the most common ways to tell a story, but there is one other. It’s elusive, and rarely used. I recently finished reading a book of short stories, edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio, as part of my 2015 Reading Challenge (see previous blog post). One of the stories in that volume has stayed with me particularly strongly for its use of this elusive Point of View. “Loser,” by Chuck Palahniuk, is written in Second Person.

Second Person is a narrative perspective where YOU are the protagonist of the story. The narrator describes events using “You did this” or “You thought that.” Before encountering “Loser,” I was used to only seeing Second Person in special cases like the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books of my childhood or the Game Master’s narration in a game of Dungeons & Dragons. Dungeons & Dragons, though, is more properly described as a collaboration between a second-person narrator and a group of first-person players, working together to craft a story on the spot. And the Choose Your Own Adventure books assume a level of interactivity from you as well, as you flip back and forth from page to page to craft your own story. As you might imagine, it’s difficult to craft a good non-interactive Second Person narrative without it sounding odd, with this unseen narrator ascribing motivations and actions to you, the reader. And it’s true that “Loser” has an odd effect on the reader because of its narrative perspective, but in this case it’s done intentionally to play into the story itself.

Basically, “Loser” is a description of that time you took acid and went on The Price is Right. The narrator’s description of your befuddled mental state and sensory overload from the bells and whistles and flashing lights as you attempt to get through the game without freaking out creates a very clear sense in the reader of what that experience would be like. It’s remarkably effective at portraying the loss of agency that one might feel after taking a mind-altering drug and entering an area of extreme sensory input. Thinking about it now, I get the sense that that loss of agency is exactly why Second Person generally feels strange to read – here’s some unknown guy telling you what you think about all of this. Who is he to tell you what you think and do? It’s an odd sensation to be sure. Palahniuk is simply leveraging that odd sensation to help him tell the story.

I highly recommend checking out “Loser,” by Chuck Palahniuk. And I’m interested to hear your thoughts in the comments – have you read any good Second Person narratives?