Word: carmens
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LIVING Who is Carmen Sandiego, and why do kids love...
...notion behind the Carmen boom is no more complex than that old favorite, cops and robbers. Carmen is a glamorous ex-spy turned international thief, who leads a gang of wry rogues with names such as Clare d'Loon, Luke Warmwater and Justin Case. The light-fingered mob crisscrosses the globe and skips back and forth in history in search of national treasures to smuggle. Carmen may steal away to ancient China to purloin the Great Wall, hop ahead to medieval England to snitch the Magna Charta, or foray to present-day Uganda to abscond with a rare mountain gorilla...
...object is to find and capture Carmen or one of her gang and restore the stolen treasures. In the version that is airing on PBS, player-detectives decipher a series of verbal clues, then use their knowledge of geography to score points. The top scorer gets to chase Carmen around a large, unmarked map. In the computer version -- which is played with the help of books like a the World Almanac or an atlas -- competitors may be shown an image of Socrates and have to know when he lived in order to move to the next clue. Carmen's trail...
...Carmen phenomenon began in San Rafael, Calif., in the workshop of the Broderbund Software Co. The co-founder of Broderbund, Gary Carlston, had the original brainstorm; software writers then wove geographical and historical facts into the clues. The program eventually grew into five different Carmen titles, selling 2 million copies. In September Golden Books began publishing a line of adventure books, including Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego? and Where in Europe Is Carmen Sandiego? This fall the half-hour Carmen TV series debuted nationally...
Educators around the country positively gush about the series. "I'm teaching a lot more geography and problem solving," says Jon Bennett, a fourth-grade teacher in Blusston, Ind., who uses the Carmen computer games in his class. "Kids have a reason for finding out where the Golden Gate Bridge is. They love Carmen, and they don't realize they're learning." But maybe, just maybe, they...