Scholastic, which created the "Magic School Bus" television series on PBS, licensed its content to Microsoft.
[8] The company hired the garage shop Music Pen to create a program, a company started 15 years prior by concert pianist Wu and composer Philip Lui who wrote programs that taught music comprehension.
[15] The series won: Software Publisher's Association Codie award for Best Elementary Educational titles and the National Parenting Center Seal of Approval.
Most recently, Scholastic's The Magic School Bus CD-ROM series by Microsoft received the FamilyPC Family Tested Software Recommended Seal in the education category and was named Top Picks of 1997 by the Toy Testing Council.
In all these titles the user gets to "drive" the bus, which almost always involves clicking on the steering wheel and choosing a location.
There is some goal to find a specific number of missing collectibles for the user in almost every game (with the exception of The Magic School Bus Explores the Human Body—the software adaptation of the original series book The Magic School Bus Inside the Human Body).
The video game series (both original titles and activity centers) are targeted for children ages 5–10.
The user flies the bus to their chosen planet and play experiments and click on things there.
The game was one of the chosen few "highly visual scholastic programs" in the Citrus Country library System's new youth CD-ROM station in 1997.
[20] The Milwaukee Sentinel was bemused that the program got a kindergartner playtester interested in the small intestines.
[24] The Boston Globe tested the program on the latest Compaq Presario computer, yet experienced game-breaking technical issues; the newspaper therefore commented that "Microsoft should be ashamed of itself".
[30] This game (in the original software series) is based on the book The Magic School Bus in the Time of the Dinosaurs and the episode The Busasaurus.
[32] Microsoft donated copies of the game to high school students via the University of Maine Upward Bound Program.
Ms. Frizzle takes the class on a field trip to the Costa Rican rainforest to find the missing bio-clones.
Like in The Magic School Bus Explores the World of Animals, this game is not based with any adaptation.
In each habitat, one of the children transforms into a bug; for examples, Arnold turns into an ambush bug when he is in the meadow, Keesha changes into a luna moth when she is in the forest, Ralphie turns into a hercules beetle when he is in the jungle, and Dorothy Ann changes into a mayfly nib when she is in the pond.
[37] Ludington Daily News praised the game for its high quality engaging multimedia and accurate information.
When traveling to certain habitats, one of the children will be transformed into an animal (for a few examples, Arnold becomes a bullfrog in the swamp, Dorothy Ann becomes an opposumling in the rainforest, Wanda becomes a sea otter in the tundra, and Tim becomes a parrot fish in the reef).
The premise was for the Magic School Bus to select a destination (starting with The Moon and reaching all the way out to Pluto).
The game would then follow the same format; Ms. Frizzle would take off into outer space, and the player (as Phoebe) would have to find her.
All missions consisted of flying to the planet (while taking photographs of various space objects, shooting apart meteors, and collecting "space buoys" for fuel), landing the bus on a platform successfully, traversing the planet on foot to find Ms. Frizzle, and putting together a sliding jigsaw puzzle to complete the stage.
This game was developed by Big Blue Bubble Inc. and published by Scholastic for the Nintendo DS console.
Published by Scholastic and released on Android and Apple devices as "Touch and tilt" storybooks that included games.
[49] Described as an interactive storybook, the app included a game with "7 different levels that explores where dinosaurs lived around the world.
"[50] Described as an interactive storybook, this one "features 1 highly re-playable game that includes over 20 animals in which children can play to earn points for more science facts and to travel to other areas of the ocean.