The Gumball Shop

## Description

_The Gumball Shop_ is an educational game for children aged five to six. It
is an interactive storybook with an original story part of the developer’s
_Kids Theater_ series of storybooks, a follow-up to its earlier _Kidstory_
series. The theater’s host is Calvin Calamari. The story is about two children
who visit a gumball shop with ice-cream, candy and cheese and even a bed made
out of bread, a clown in a pancake gown, jeans to fit sardines, a chair to fly
in the air or a snail with a rose on its tail. The story is narrated through
characters and songs. Certain text is also shown and words are highlighted as
it is read. Some parts in the environment can be clicked for a short
animation. Mostly the story progresses with a minimum amount of interaction.
There are twenty pages in total and after completing the story an index page
is presented to return to any page.

During the story there are a number of buttons near the bottom of the screen.
The question mark provides information about the interface, the mouth is used
to auto read the whole story, and the puzzle button is used to play games and
practice spelling in a separate section not part of the story. In this
separate puzzle section there are twelve jigsaw puzzles to solve with images
from the story. Clicking the spelling bee leads to a mini-game where words
need to be spelled with three difficulty levels. The word is read out loud and
the player needs to select the letters to spell the word. In the memory game
panels need to be flipped to locate identical images.