Encarta was charged with multimedia. It was a really new and exciting experience for a kid growing up before Flash sites started really even became popular. Loading up Encarta, you'd get a musical intro with flashes of footage from shuttle launches, famous speeches, native American tribes, animals, etc. Then immediate after, you get a button called "Explore". Clicking that zooms you into a web of categories, with each one zooming further and further down into more fine-grained topics where you could get previews about what you were about to discover.
The articles were concise and full of video or other interactive pieces. Certain topics would have a brief sound recording as an introduction. I even remember you could assemble a dinosaur to learn about the different parts.
Every prominent UI interaction, from a button click to expanding a context menu, had a unique and satisfying sound. That would be a huge problem for most people with most UI today, but given that there was so much media being played, it fit in naturally.
The interface itself was basically a web browser, so it helped to teach kids about simple concepts, like navigation, hyperlinks, bookmarks, internal vs external resources, and so on. It was a great pre-introduction to surfing the web.
For a kid, I think Encarta would be a much more fun and engaging experience than Wikipedia when choosing an encyclopedia. If you want to see what Bill Gates envisioned for multimedia learning around the time, you should check out the (hilariously cheesy) videos that came with his book "The Road Ahead"
And don't even get me started on how cool the Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia was at the time.
(Am I really getting nostalgic over encyclopedias over here? ...)
The articles were concise and full of video or other interactive pieces. Certain topics would have a brief sound recording as an introduction. I even remember you could assemble a dinosaur to learn about the different parts.
Every prominent UI interaction, from a button click to expanding a context menu, had a unique and satisfying sound. That would be a huge problem for most people with most UI today, but given that there was so much media being played, it fit in naturally.
The interface itself was basically a web browser, so it helped to teach kids about simple concepts, like navigation, hyperlinks, bookmarks, internal vs external resources, and so on. It was a great pre-introduction to surfing the web.
For a kid, I think Encarta would be a much more fun and engaging experience than Wikipedia when choosing an encyclopedia. If you want to see what Bill Gates envisioned for multimedia learning around the time, you should check out the (hilariously cheesy) videos that came with his book "The Road Ahead"
And don't even get me started on how cool the Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia was at the time.
(Am I really getting nostalgic over encyclopedias over here? ...)