Where's that infomercial when you really need one? How Language Adventure can help your kids make fun of you in six languages

by Robert X. Cringely

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Joe Adler always reminds me of Dudley Moore. Both men are English, have curly brown hair, love music and are the size of tea cozies. Joe is also a computer guy. We first met a number of years ago at a product introduction for the startup company he was running at the time. Unlike the earnest young chief executives I was used to meeting at such events, Joe didn't take his product (or me) all that seriously. As a result, I wrote a glowing story about his Ethernet mapping gizmo, and reverse psychology was revalidated for the millionth time. Within months, Joe sold his company to Hewlett-Packard for enough to buy that vineyard on the hill so many company founders dream of. And that might have been that, except grapevines grow so slowly. Having dug all the holes by hand, then planted his grapes and protected those grapes from marauding deer, Joe made the discovery that it would be three to five years before he'd have enough grapes to actually make wine. There was nothing for Joe to do but start another company. The result is Instinct Corp., the best educational software company you've never heard of.

Instinct is one of those "virtual companies" that dot Silicon Valley. There are three founders, though I've never met the other two and don't really know if they exist. Each person works at home, and they communicate with one another by fax and modem. As far as I know, the company is still only that big, which made it seem really silly the day I was visiting Joe and a FedEx truck drove up to deliver the payroll. But in Instinct's case, lack of size may be an advantage, because it has allowed the company to pound away for years on product concepts that are hard to sell -- customer creativity and imagination. It hasn't hurt, either, that each founder struck it rich at some other company before founding Instinct.

Until this week, Instinct's product line has been built entirely around Magic Theatre, which is nothing less than a multimedia authoring system for preschoolers. Armed with a Windows PC, a mouse, soundcard and microphone, Magic Theatre users can create little movies complete with animation, sound track and narration. They tell a story into the mike while drawing, pasting, rubber-stamping or otherwise illustrating the story onscreen. When it's done, the story can be played back, with the pictures automatically drawing themselves and the sound completely synchronized. Kids can save their movies or send them to Grandma over the Internet or on a floppy disk. And all this is performed without a keyboard.

But it's been an uphill battle for Instinct and Magic Theatre because the customers it enables to be so creative and imaginative are preschoolers, and don't have much money. Magic Theatre also isn't the kind of thing they give away with the Beanie Babies at McDonald's. Parents, if they know about Magic Theatre at all, might not understand the concept of a product that has no set storylines or characters and relies totally on the imaginations of its young users. Those young users have no problem at all understanding and using the product, which is quite addictive.

For those who require more structure, there are special versions of Magic Theatre for making Spiderman, Batman, X-Men and Haunted House cartoons.

While Magic Theatre is great, Instinct's new product is even better. Language Adventure uses storytelling techniques to teach little kids to speak a foreign language. And not just one language: Language Adventure teaches English, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. Your child (or you, if your brain isn't ossified like mine) can start from whichever of those languages is the one you already speak and learn any of the others.

It all happens within an evolving story that begins very sparsely ("It's Pinteresque at first," says Joe). And for good reason, since in the opening scene the software has to assume the user has no vocabulary at all. The software keeps track of the user's progress, and the only way to get through the whole story is to learn the whole lesson.

Language Adventure has a solid basis in educational research, which Joe tore from the brains of language teachers at Stanford University who, let's just say, turned out not to be all that technically astute. It's not like they were already working on an adult version of Language Adventure. But who knows, now they might be.

I think this is a wonderful program just for what it does and how it is built. There is a great problem with educational software -- most of it is bad, and the stuff that is good is often invisible or unappreciated. It's a crapshoot more than you'd ever guess. Take, for example, one of the biggest successes in this area, Broderbund's Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? This mammoth hit with its tie-in PBS show almost didn't make it to market, according to documents I saw when I was an expert witness in the divorce trial of Broderbund founder Doug Carlston. As an expert on both software and divorce, I assure you I am not making this up. Doug Carlston opposed Carmen when the product was in development and urged his company not to pursue it, showing that not even the most experienced software folks call it right every time.

While Carmen is a juggernaut, Broderbund also has a lot more resources than little Instinct, so please take a look at the Web site listed under the "I Like" button below, and consider ordering this software for some smart kid you know. There's nothing in it for me, by the way. I am not in any way connected with Instinct. I just want the program to be a success. It performs a great function without demeaning, boring, forcing into some predefined role or firing shotguns or photon torpedoes at its audience. Success for Language Adventure would be a good outcome, too, for the Adler household. Developing the new software has really taken a toll. Joe, his wife, and their two little beta-tester daughters now speak a polyglot of six languages, with the result being that they are no longer sure what language they are speaking at all. The grapes, however, are coming along nicely.

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