GameBoy cartridge offers Web research without the Web

Few parents ever thought that the ubiquitous GameBoy, that carrier of all things Pokemon and Super Mario, would offer any educational value. But now an official Nintendo publisher has come up with a cartridge that offers information rather than interactive cartoons, reports the Deseret (UT) News.

Pocket Direct is marketing a cartridge for GameBoy that features basic information about math, science and history.

"The whole idea behind KwikNotes is immediate access to that once-learned, easily forgotten and frequently hard-to-find information that keeps popping up during junior and high school years," said Pete Suarez, who along with Jo Ann Holferty developed KwikNotes. "Not unlike Cliff Notes, we took War and Peace, in effect, and squished it down here, taking out all but the essential information."

Functioning as a kind of personal tutor, a student can use a GameBoy and KwikNotes to retrieve information about astronomy, biology, multiplication and spelling and chemistry. Holferty and Suarez have taken information from libraries, teacher guides and textbooks and condensed the information into the cartridge.

"For an assignment, what we found out, they (students) will take the path of least resistance to finding out information," said Suarez. "Where the Internet is an incredible source of information, it can be very distracting and even somewhat dangerous. So this is an alternative to that. It's a tutor, it's an alternative to the Internet or can augment what might be on the Internet, and it can help parents become more involved in what the kids are doing with their education.""