The GeoSafari Jr. was a cleverly flexible kid's game

Kids these days. Learnin’ stuff on computers. [in an increasingly Southern drawl] Back in my day we didn’t have no fancy pants touch screens with apps. Why, we did our eee-lec-tronic learnin’ on this! [intense stare] OK I’ll stop that. Hello. It’s stupidly cold outside right now (as I read this about 2 below zero, or -19 metric degrees) which means the heat pump video needs to be delayed. I told you that might happen - I’m not going out there to film anything ‘til it’s at least a little warmer. If you’re here in the future or don’t have the context, don’t worry - I’ll put a card up there when it’s out, and the context is simply that I said it would be coming soon in the last video. Linear time sure is pesky. Today, though, we’re gonna talk about this old educational toy of mine. Could you tell that I caught my hand on my sleeve? Was it that bad? Now, unlike a certain toaster, I’m not about to attempt convincing anyone that this is better than today’s educational tech, be it an iPad or Chromebook or whatever. Those are wonderful learning tools, and they’ve very much come in handy recently. Well for some kids, anyway. It’s a complicated mess I know that but I’m not here to explore that, just this silly thing. It’s yellow! And very clever, which is why I like it. This is the GeoSafari Junior, a revision of the original GeoSafari that, as far as I can tell, is essentially the same thing but with a different color and slightly different design. It has been surprisingly difficult to get information about this thing’s history. Educational Insights is the company responsible for manufacturing it, and they’re still around! But its genesis is very unclear. For instance - its name. Why is it called GeoSafari? It has very little to do with geography or safaris, as you’ll soon see. Someone has written on Wikipedia that this is the brainchild of the National Geographic Society and that Educational Insights manufactured it for them. That might help explain its name but I can’t find any source to corroborate that, nor is there any mention of National Geographic on its box. Further adding to the confusion is that Educational Insights used the GeoSafari brand on many other things, including software. In fact, the GeoSafari has what some might call the misfortune of being featured in Microsoft Bob, along with an actual geography quiz for once. Hi - it’s me from the Future. By rigorously analyzing this box as shown in LGR’s video on Microsoft Bob, I’ve been able to conclude that the original GeoSafari does appear to have been Geography-focused, and that the Jr version was a way to extend the device’s abilities and appeal to a younger audience. However, the decision to keep calling it GeoSafari remains slightly odd. I suppose they had achieved decent enough brand recognition to stick with the name, and in the next section you’ll see that the name is still alive. And that’s actually how I realized nobody knows anything about this. See, on the Wikipedias somebody claimed Educational Insights actually created Microsoft Bob! And they even have a citation for that! I mean, it’s wrong. Clearly this doesn’t say that Educational Insights created Bob, it just talks about the GeoSafari game included in it. And GeoSafari Jr. is alive and well, but as a brand having nothing to do with this product! For instance, here’s the GeoSafari Jr. Kidscope! So yeah, what’s going on? Who knows! I reached out to Educational Insights about the history of all this and hopefully they get back to me. This is filler that I’m writing now just in case they don’t. It helps with pacing, see. I figure if they do get back to me, then this will be a rather acceptable length of text for their answer. If they didn’t, well that’s a shame, but hopefully somebody in the comments will know somebody that knows. Anyway, the specifics of its history aside, let’s talk about how this thing works! The user interface is pretty basic, essentially just a number pad with a large enter key and three other buttons: clear, *makes I dunno noise* and the Knowledge Button. We’ll get there. To the left of the keypad is a simple LED display, with some instructions to its left (and LEDs to help guide the user) and a power switch and volume control. Up the sides of this large blank space are 26 red rectangular LEDs, 13 on each side. When you power it on, it makes a peasant greeting noise and says [electronic Bee-doo] Well, hello! Nice to meet you. The LED beside “enter code number” is now flashing. Now if it seems like something is missing here, well that’s because it is. The large blank space is in fact a holder for the various games it can play. They come in the form of these large cards, and the designers were nice enough to include a storage pocket for them right on the back. You’ll see that in the top right of each card is a code number. When the card is placed on the GeoSafari you’ll see that there are now items that line up with the various LEDs on the sides. And that’s how the games or quizzes work. Entering the code tells it what game you are playing. Assuming it was a valid code, it’ll then ask you if you would like one or two players. Then, because what game isn’t fun unless it’s also a little stressful, you give yourself a time limit (and your opponent does as well, if playing with two players). Now, an arrow lights up to indicate which player is up, and the Knowledge Button starts flashing. For clarity, I’m calling it the Knowledge Button. For all I know it’s called Gerald. When you hit the Knowledge Button, the game goes beep boop beepity boopity like any good late ‘80s early ‘90s thing should and the lights they go a ‘blinkin. [beep boop beepity boopity] It will randomly select one item, and now it’s up to you to answer the question correctly. If you do, you get a nice celebrational melody. [♫ ascending tones ♫] If you don’t… [BZZZZ] Real quick - I wanted to find out if the tones it produces during the question shuffling are tied to each light or if it’s random. Let’s find out. [sound is chopped up and re-arranged in order of tone. A complete chromatic scale repeats three time] Well, looks like it’s random. Anyway... If you answer incorrectly you lose a point. [beep, BZZZZ] See, up here it tells you how many points are possible in the game. You can try again, but you only get three chances. [beep, BZZZZ. beep] On the third incorrect answer [BZZZZ] it shows you the correct answer and the Knowledge Button lights again, inviting you to move on. At the end of the game, it plays a ditty. Which ditty? Tell us, Will! [an electronic rendition of the William Tell Overture]. They’ve included a fun Easter egg, too. If you play a perfect game, the melody is extended and the lights do this fun celebrational display. [a slightly more complete William Tell Overture] Now this is pure excellence in design! [uncomfortably intense stare] Now let’s talk about these last two special buttons. C is short for clear, and its function is pretty clear. It allows you to clear something you’ve entered in error. No harm done. The *makes I dunno noise* button is for when you give up and just want it to tell you the correct answer [beep]. If you use this question mark-adorned button, you forfeit all the points from that question because that’s what you deserve, cheater! Although this device is very simple and, I think it’s fair to say, crude by 2021 standards, in some ways its simplicity allows it incredible flexibility. The variety of concepts that are explored in these games is immense. For example, there are simple vocabulary exercises, but sometimes there's an extra component such as learning the forms of baby animals. That tadpole’s a real sneaky one. Also, goats and sheep? Dastardly. But I suppose it’s never too early to get your kids and lambs straight. But there’s so much more. I feel like this was one of those cases where a limitation, that being the device’s form factor and simple operation, led to a surprising amount of creativity. Beyond simple vocab there’s identifying shapes, reading descriptions to pick out which closet belongs to which kid, you’ve got spatial reasoning - Wowie Zowie - you can learn what tools to use for measuring things, or basic units themselves (as you can see aversion to the metric system is indoctrinated at a very young age. This is where it all starts, folks!). There are games around pattern recognition. Learning the basics of agriculture (with fun facts to boot!). Action words. Counting money. Optical illusions. And even basic science concepts like discerning between organic and inorganic materials! It’s really neat! The creators and artists did a great job making these visually appealing to ‘90s kids as well as helping their parents understand what skill each game was meant to develop with descriptions like visual sequencing, matching silhouettes, discriminating between properties, and even matching inventions to their animal inspirations! That’s a very important skill! As is the flipside, matching animals to their lunches. Actually, ehh this one is kind of important, anyway it’s neat, isn’t it? As far as the way the games are structured, there are in fact only two kinds of game this can play. Either the game will ask for the correct number as some sort of matching exercise, or it will be a multiple choice question with up to four possible answers. And again, while that seems limiting at first glance - it’s actually not, really. You can implement either one in various ways. For instance, matching can be literal simple matching, but it can also be used for fill-in-the-blank type scenarios, math exercises like in the money game, or even wordplay exercises like these which are apparently called rebus puzzles. This just taught me something. Multiple choice, while only allowing the answers 1, 2, 3, or 4, is actually even more flexible. With multiple choice you can either have a game where the same question is asked of multiple items, for instance "does this key have a match or not?" Or "which category does this belong to?" And that itself can be done in lots of different ways like here with this anagram exercise. But, you can also pose a different question with each item such as this case with identifying objects or judging optical illusions. These games all have the same multiple choice syntax, if you will, but the implementations are so different you wouldn’t likely notice. And that’s why I love this thing. It hits that perfect sweet spot between cleverness, simplicity, ingenuity, and flexibility. And of course it’s just littered with LEDs, none of which are blue! So that’s guaranteed to make me happy. One thing that I wanted to find out, though, was how those codes work. It seemed plausible that the game would have a database of some sort and that these codes called up stored games. But on second thought that seemed kinda dumb. After all, surely they’d want to sell you more of these games at a later date! So, the codes actually define the parameters of the game. It was pretty easy to figure this out, first there are different games with the same code. Compare these two and you’ll find that the answers are the same for each given position. There are multiple duplicates like this, but it’s not like that would really matter and in any case the content in the middle can be shuffled around to mask it. But the dead giveaway was this card that I’ve apparently never noticed before. A make-your-own game with blank everything. Sadly, I don’t have the manual for this and haven’t been able to find it online. I’d love to get into the specifics of exactly how this coding scheme works, alas we’ll just have to not. Someone named Donna Young runs a website which has some downloadable guides on the subject, but to access them I’d need to create some sort of account [in a really complainy-tone] and like there could be a paywall for all I know and I just didn’t need that right now so just know that the codes were literally encoding the game’s parameters, OK? We can live with that, can’t we? I think so. Besides, someone will probably pop into the comments to answer this within a few hours of this going live. Anyway, the last thing I want to do is take this thing apart and explore its insides. I don’t expect they’ll be all that interesting, but maybe there’s some hidden secrets in here or something. Maybe it’ll have the location of Jimmy Hoffa in there. You never know. But for this part, we’re gonna go scriptless for a change. Now I’ll record an outro which will go after I do this next part. Movie Magic! Hey, it’s the unscripted part! We’re gonna take this apart. That’s about it. Before we do though… this takes six (but really it’s four) D cells. Uh, not very important… but now you know! [it beeps Hello! as the batteries are shuffled] Apparently I left it on. It has some sort of auto power saving mode where if you leave it on for very long it will “turn off” but I imagine it is draining some power because that is a physical switch. So, uh, you can’t see it because of the way the lighting is situated but this is very translucent and it looks like the back comes off first. So we’re gonna tackle that first. [squeaky high-pitched nonsense] One thing that I’ve done is I’ve shot all the B-roll that I need before I’m doing this just in case I break it. I don’t think I’m going to but, ya know… good to be prepared. Oh! And these screws are different lengths. Yay! The two shorter ones go in the middle. The top middle. Your eyes are there, not there. My eyes are there. Your eyes are there. Oh, by the way there is a label on the back that says “Made in China for Education Insights.” No mention of National Geographic… again I don’t think they had any part in this. Oh, and there is a plug for an AC adapter back here! Makes sense. I just never noticed that. [more squeaky nonsense] There are what look to be some clips here so I think the back is locked into the bottom. I’m gonna try to remove it. [squeak squeakin' squeak squeakity] There’s two more tricky screws. This is why you don’t force things, because you’re probably just being silly. [squeakity] There we go. There are two circuit boards going up the sides and those would have the LEDs. How difficult will it be to remove them? We will find out. [squeakin'] Well it's just a bunch of LEDs. I’d I, um.. I’m sure this is not shocking. Uh, no support components - just LEDs. There’s an interesting detail, the plastic here is just like melted. Like they slipped this in underneath this goopy bit. [squeaker squeak] There is some very old dust falling out of here. That’s… cool. [squeak squeak squeak squeak squeaker...] Ya know, when Honda made their first hybrid vehicle, I’m sure they learned some things. So those were Educational Insights. [PUNS!] That’s really weird how they’ve don… the wires for the battery terminals are like underneath this thing that’s been melted down, it looks like. So they’ve used the actual plastic of the case as a sort of hot glue. I’m just gonna set this over to the side. [squeakin'] And... I’m somewhat surprised ‘cause I thought this might be too old for this practice but there’s just a blob. I was hoping there might be some discrete ICs that we could see. And there probably are on the other side, I’ll try to remove it. But, the most impressive thing and I knew this would have an actual speaker and not a piezo buzzer in here just by the sound is that it has an actual little tiny speaker! It’s… the sound quality of the boops is quite good. [the squeaking continues] OK, here we go! Here we go! We got it! Here’s the board. We’ve got the LED display, which I don’t know if this would be cust- oh, it’s socketed! I don’t know if it’s worth trying to remove it but it’s actually… it’s in some sort of a socket! But anyway there’s the LED display… can you even see this? It’s in frame! Barely, I think I’ll give you some other, some other close-ups but we’ve got the LED display, the four LEDs there, the volume potentiometer, the power switch, and mainly what’s on here is a bunch of transistors and this fairly la - oh! So that was a heatsink. That’s what this was. Probably the power transistor for the speaker. Why did they think it needed a heat sink? It’s not like it buzzes all the time. Let me see if I can confirm that’s what that is. Oh ya know what? It’s prob- I’m thinking it’s probably a voltage regulator now that I think about it. So maybe it does get warm enough. And surely if… if it has an AC adaptor it probably needs one. I’ll take a picture of that component and find out. Here’s some movie magic for you: Yes, that’s a voltage regulator. So the speaker is driven by the other transistors. See, I recorded both. That way I can look it up later! But I think that’s it for taking it apart. Now let’s finish out the video. So, that’s the GeoSafari Jr. A really intriguing device that demonstrates what a little ingenuity, a simple electronic game, and a bit of cardstock can do. While the blank canvas of a touchscreen certainly lends more opportunities for fun and games than this thing ever did, there’s just something about this device that tickles my fancy. Sure, I’m nostalgic for it, but even now making this video I’m impressed with the variety of concepts it explored with nothing but a bit of paper and totally rad graphic design. Oh, and I also love the little things they used to do back in the day like put a fake speaker grille here on this side to make you think this is in stereo. Ah, such a classic. Nothing like stereo boops and beeps [hello! beep]. Anyway, thanks for watching! Heat pumps should be next and I hope you’re pumped about that hot topic. Ok I’ll go… ♫ educationally smooth jazz ♫ If you’re here in the future, don’t worry! Well, maybe you should worry, actually. That’s a problem! How are you in the future? We gotta get Picard on this. I’m not here to talk, ah, gah. Frah frah frah! And now it’s up to you to answer the question correctly. If you do, you’ll get a nice… ble celebrational sound [buzzes] hah! There are games around pattern recognition, learning the basics of agriculture, actions words, counting money, optical illusions, and even basic science con… haa!! We screwed up the order! OK, learning the basics of agriculture… [intense shuffling] [under breath] ...simple vocab there’s things like identifying shapes… descriptions to figure out which closet belongs to which kid, flip it around, got spatial reasoning wowie zowie, learn what tools are used for measuring things… there are games around pattern recognition… learning the basics of agriculture… action words…. counting money… optical illusions and then this OK! I think we’ve got it. ...words, counting money, optical illusions, and even basic science concepts like discerning between organic and inorganic materials. We did it! [laughs] My acorn is missing. Did you eat the acorn? You owe me a new acorn.

Channel: Technology Connections

Views: 579,985

Rating: 4.9580493 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 7SZHA3qTc6c

Length: 21min 11sec (1271 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 10 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/irridisregardless]

Educational Honda Insights is one of the best worst jokes you've ever made

[u/TurnbullFL]

Neat trick to save precious(in those days) memory by reusing the same code for several cards.

How many different codes are there? I wonder if a kid could memorize the sequence for all the different codes.
Then he could look like a genius when presented with a new and difficult card.

[u/Olivier21093]

I love your videos ❤️

[u/Summer_Moon2]

Here's the manual:

http://web.archive.org/web/20150925135826/https://www.educationalinsights.com/text/EI/downloads/guides/8865_GeoSafariLearn_G.pdf

edit: typo

[u/Who_GNU]

I like seeing a little bit of Technology Conextras in a Technology Connections video.

It's been two hours, has anyone reverse engineered the code yet?

A four digit number has 10,000 combinations (0 to 9,999) and log base 2 of 10,000 is 13.2877123795495, so there's 13 bits that can go into the number, plus one that can sometimes be a '1' but has two be a '0' for a little more than two thirds of the combinations. If anything, it's possible to copy the same question location and answer numbers as pre-exsisting cards.

If someone can find scans of the cards, or go through the work of scanning them, it would be possible to make a table of each bit in the code, the location of each question, and the corresponding answers. Without the cards, but with the machine, entering a code, then pressing '?' after each prompt to get each question location and correct answer, and putting that in a table would work, too. Either method should make it easy to decode the codes, once there's a table. For the latter method, I'd first try powers of two, and their preceding numbers, i.e. this list of codes:

0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 15, 16, 31, 32, 63, 64, 127, 128, 255, 256, 511, 512, 1023, 1024, 2047, 2048, 4097, 4096, 8191, 8192, and for good measure, 9999

It's also possible that there's a more limited number of layouts pre-programmed, with no relation to the bit status. If that's the case, entering random codes may result in an error.

[u/betamark]

Another hit from the king! I was fortunate enough to have one of these (and perhaps it still lives in my folk's basement as it was very special to me). Can confirm it initially came with geography quiz and was expanded with extra card sets. If I recall correctly there was an attached pen with actuating tip used for even more interactions. It was arguably a precursor to a more modern pc/or tablet in some ways. Just wanted to shout out that I also LOVED my GeoSafari (and its all red LEDs)! Thanks for the interesting video and stay warm out there. Maybe percolate some coffee? My spouse says "I think you are really cool!"

P.S. I'll call mom and see if we still have it. Fingers crossed 🤞

[u/iroks]

Hey /u/TechConnectify and other people, watching this i remember i still have this old Polish game made in 1970-73. Looks like this concept is quite old.
Link to gallery
You put a card on top and then you need to make physical connections between question on the right and the answer on the left. If it's a proper answer it will shine a light. It runs on 3R12 battery.
I know that it's in a bad shape but it still works, only i think one connection is missing after this years.

[u/bagofwisdom]

Oh man, my aunt gave me one of the non-Junior Geo Safaris when I was a kid. However, I was more interested in the magic of the device than the actual educational aspect :p

[u/ultradip]

"None of which are blue!" 🤣