Parents who are stumped by their children's homework can get some assistance from Microsoft for the next academic year.
Microsoft Student 2006, to be released by the software giant later this month for $119.99 (Cdn.), is described as comprehensive productivity software designed to help middle-school and high-school students complete challenging homework assignments.
A survey called Back to School 2006, conducted in May by pollsters at Ipsos-Reid and commissioned by Microsoft Canada, reported that 29 per cent of parents with children between the ages of 11 and 18 consider themselves unprepared to help their children with homework. They cited insufficient knowledge (51 per cent) and a lack of time (42 per cent) as the primary areas of frustration. Moreover, 56 per cent of parents say that their children express frustration at the amount of homework they have to complete.
Most parents think their children struggle most with is math (45 per cent) and 37 per cent of parents feel that this is the subject they are least able to help their children with.
"We know parents aren't always able to act as teacher and tutor, particularly as children get older and homework becomes more complex," Microsoft Canada's said Natalie Tehrani said.
The package has templates and tutorials, graphing calculator software, and tools for sorting on-line clutter and digital reference content.
A module called Learning Essentials for Students allows customizing Microsoft Office with toolbars, templates and tutorials to help students with subjects as diverse as history reports, English papers, physics projects and foreign languages. Graphing Calculator software tools are designed to help students visualize and understand math and science concepts through two- and three-dimensional graphing capabilities.
The Web Companion streamlines on-line research, providing access to what the developers consider to be "trusted information." The Ipsos-Reid survey found a quarter of parents (26 per cent) say it takes too long to find information on the Internet that is suitable for homework, and 31 per cent say that Internet information collected for homework is often of questionable quality.
An additional feature in the suite is Book Summaries, which delivers facts and insights on classic works of literature, content from Microsoft Encarta, an Interactive World Atlas and multimedia clips.