Muzzy Online : A Language Course for Children

Muzzy Online. A language course for children created by Early Advantage, [n.d.]. Available on the websites of many American libraries.

Annotation: Travel with Muzzy, the clock-eating green monster, as he flies around the world, meets many interesting characters, and eventually ends up saving the day. 

Summary: Muzzy began in 1986 as an animated film created by the BBC. It was later adapted to become a language course for children, and has now been updated to include interactive features in an online environment. Many American libraries offer Muzzy Online through their websites, free of charge to their patrons.



Muzzy loves to eat metal objects, clocks being his favorite, and as he lands his spacecraft in Gondoland, he meets a cast of characters including a king, a queen, and a princess, as well as a gardener who is in love with the princess, and an evil scientist. The story grows from there and involves an elopement, jail time, and computer clones.

While the plot sounds very mature, it is presented in an age appropriate manner. The movie segments are accompanied by language lessons and vocabulary building exercises that present the same words again and again, but in different contexts. It is thought that children learn language best when it is immersive and repetitious, and Muzzy Online utilizes this approach.

With eight world languages to choose from, two levels of difficulty, and the option of subtitles, the Muzzy Online site is incredibly versatile and offers a broad range of interactive language experiences.



Critical Evaluation: Muzzy (on DVD) and Muzzy Online are internationally recognized as the number one language course for children. Millions of children have learned a foreign language while enjoying animated videos and vocabulary exercises.

There are many glowing reviews and success stories featured on the Early Advantage website, which demonstrate the solid results that participants in the program have achieved. However, while the program was updated in 2013 with all-new animation and audio, the animation, voices, and music appear and sound dated, particularly in contrast to other current interactive apps or computer animated media for children. 

Also, the layout of the various screens (which in many cases feature an active window within two larger frames, which are overlaid on an animated background) is distracting and draws attention away from the course content. Due to this overly complicated layout, there is often an awkward screen break which requires scrolling down to reach the area of the page where a mouse click is required to advance to the next segment of the lesson.

 

A redesign of the page layouts, and an update to the visual and audio portions of the course, would result in a more sophisticated and up to date presentation, which would be much more fitting to a language learning tool that has achieved such a high degree of international success. 

Age or Interest Level: Ages 2 to 7

Awards: Parents Choice Gold Award; iParenting Media Award; 
English Speaking Union Award

Why Included? In an increasingly global society, children who have foreign language skills will have a better chance of success in their career opportunities as adults. Muzzy Online is a language tool that public and school libraries can offer their youngest patrons and their families, in order to give them a head start towards meeting the demands of the future.