Gertrude Secrets

Gertrude's Secrets: Logic game for logical children.
A favorite of my childhood, this game begins with the simplest of interfaces: a cursor moved by the arrow keys and clicked by keyboard. Through this interface the user solves a variety of block puzzles; colored, textured shapes must be placed into patterns satisfying rules of increasing complexity. Every puzzle completed wins the user a trophy; every trophy can be edited and redrawn in a clever built-in editor. Though this game lacks a save feature, I still recall each puzzle I triumphantly solved.

A top game, I'm preparing to give it to my high school students.
Other features of this game include a duck which quacks loudly, obnoxiously, and quite wonderfully to the ears of any young boy, girl, or human child. The duck can be moved around, and if I recall correctly it serves as a sort of guard or alarm for one's wonderful trophy room. The duck and I were never friends.
The puzzles are by default set up with simple colored geometric shapes, but the shapes can be changed to other settings. One set of colored playing pieces is the set of alien spacecraft designs. Another set of colored playing pieces is the set of foreign buildings. I do not believe that there was an Art Deco set. I also feel rather strongly that there was no Susan Kare-designed set of icons, and I feel that there was no Soviet-Realist set. Despite these minor artistic flaws and the limited color palette and resolution of the game, it retains great staying power.
I recall playing the Apple II version of the game; it came in an elegant white box with a goose and a child on the cover. The goose had a nice box with glowing colored plexiglass shapes in it, and the goose's box clearly held secrets of interest to the child.
This game was produced in the early 1980s, some thirty years after the development of the Hydrogen bomb, which it was almost certainly not a direct cause of the development of. A funny side note: the modern bikini swimsuit is, in fact, named after the remote Pacific island where early H-bomb tests took place not for any reason of cultural influence but because the new bathing suit was expected to have as dramatic an influence on fashion as the Bomb did on the eponymous atoll.