Top 5 educational games and apps for kids

Photo by – babbagecabbage

Educational games have captured the Windows, Android, and Apple platforms with their versatility and educational content. We have compiled our favorite educational games and apps for teens that we think are currently the best!

 

myHomework

Available on iOS, Windows, and Android platforms, myHomework helps kids to organize their homework and other related work by giving them space to record homework assignments and projects, keep track of responsibilities and schedule extracurricular activities. The educational app can be accessed from any remote location making sure that the teen’s assignments and projects are always available, even during group studies. The date reminder tool in the educational app helps kids to keep track of their assignment deadlines.

Spore Origins

This great educational game is unfortunately not available on Android, Windows and iOS being its chosen platforms. The biology game requires players to survive as a multi-cellular organism in a tide pool in an hour long play. The educational game is divided into 18 separate functions with the player eating smaller organisms and avoiding being eaten by bigger organisms. After every three levels, the player is given a choice to upgrade to an organism in any four of these categories - perception, attack, defense, and movement. 

Psychobabble

Popcap.com originally developed the online education game as a video game – Psychobabble. The original game required players to choose words from a word bank and create sentences, phrases, in teams, and enter the answers in a chat room that was a part of the game. Due to the cost and time of monitoring these chat rooms for racy content, the game was eventually discontinued. Today the educational game is back in a new avatar! Available on the iOS platform, the game offers a variety of options to build one’s vocabulary and quicken the brain’s association with words. 

Fit Brains Trainer

Developed by Vivity Labs, the educational app is only available on Apple iOS. It’s just the right app for teens who find it mind boggling to deal with and balance busy schedules and developing hormones! Brains Trainer ensures their minds stay sharp amidst the chaos! Just a few minutes every day on the app can boost teens’ brain power, memory and problem solving skills!

Space Chem

Space Chem, developed by Zachtronics Industries, is available on all the three platforms of Google, Apple, and Windows. The educational game is loosely based on the chemistry and the principles of chemical bonding. The player is required to produce one or more specific chemical molecules by programming two remote manipulators called “waldos”.

With these 5 educational games apps, teens will soon learn that learning is as fun as sending IMs on smart phones and tablets!

5 Ways Educational Games Outdo Teachers – The Effectiveness of Educational Games

Educational games have come a long way. From being an unknown concept endorsed primarily by their makers and a few stray voices, they have gradually proved their worth in classrooms and homes across the world and won the appreciation of parents, teachers and kids. What is it about these games that make them so popular? A lot of research has gone into the effectiveness of educational games, and the results are pretty interesting.

 Photo by Erik (HASH) Hersman

According to modern research, educational games by their very design are able to do certain things that most classroom teachers cannot. Here are five areas in which educational games outperform teachers:

1.       Educational games give instant feedback

Instant feedback is an important contributor to a positive learning experience. For kids doing well, it provides reassurance and motivation to continue performing well. For kids who are performing a task incorrectly, it prevents them from learning the incorrect procedure and encourages them to attempt a different approach. The same feedback when provided after a delay cannot reproduce the same results. However, teachers rarely provide test results or even corrected assignments immediately after the students turn them in. Educational games, on the other hand, respond to every input with feedback on the player’s performance.

2.       Educational games keep kids engrossed

Being focused and involved during lessons greatly impacts how well a student retains information. However, students find it difficult to remain alert and involved throughout the school day, in part due to the teacher’s inability to make lessons interesting for the students. In direct contrast, educational games give great importance to engaging players, and keep them engrossed for hours on end.

3.       Educational games do not threaten a child’s self-esteem

Many kids feel threatened by the learning atmosphere in classrooms where mistakes are looked down upon or ridiculed by classmates and teachers. Children are afraid to make mistakes, and this limits their enthusiasm to try and learn new things. In educational games, mistakes are never laughed at. Kids are constantly given motivation and positive reinforcement when they are working on a task, and this gives them the self-esteem to try newer and more difficult tasks.

4.       Educational games recognize and reward achievements

Educational games have a multi-level reward system that rewards every achievement of players, whether big or small. This allows players to see the results of their efforts and motivates them to try harder and aim for bigger rewards. It is nearly impossible for teachers to monitor every student’s performance so carefully, forget rewarding every small achievement. 

5.       Educational games provide a customized learning experience

In most classrooms, teachers teach the same lesson to the entire class, catering to only a few of them. Students familiar with the concepts end up bored, and those who have difficulty understanding it end up frustrated. Educational games customize every lesson according to the abilities of the player, moving to more complex lessons or providing extra practice with the same lessons based on the player’s performance.

Keeping students engrossed, customizing lessons, monitoring progress and providing constant feedback and motivation are just a few of the ways that educational games help kids learn scholastic skills. These innate characteristics of educational games are what make them so effective and have earned them a permanent place in many students’ learning experience.

Math is Fun – Cool and Fun Math Tips and Tricks

Math can be complex, analytical, tricky, interesting, and more! Put together, all of these can also make math fun! Math wouldn’t have been half as fun as it is if it was easy and a cakewalk. Math requires strong analytical skills and a deep understanding of different concepts to be fun to anybody. Let’s find out why math is fun!

Math and related careers

• Most top paying professions require advanced skills in math – doctors, engineers, architects, bankers, analysts, developers, researchers, and more. If the great ancient Indian scientist Aryabhatta  hadn’t conceptualized ‘zero’, the status of our mathematical achievements would have been rather different from what they are today, and we wouldn’t have had computers, internet, and mobiles to lead us forward in our professional and personal space.
• Since math is just not about numbers but also about patterns and critical thinking, fashion and interior designers too are required to be well-adept in math.
• We use math in our daily lives too – shopping, cooking, designing the garden, planning the budget, organizing family trips, working on computers, solving puzzles, and the list goes on.

 

How to make math fun –

‘Reading’ math is very different from reading a language. A 100-word long paragraph in English can be summarized in a 10 digit math problem to make the entire story simpler! For example, when I asked my roommate last night how much the groceries cost, she promptly replied she has forgotten the individual prices and all she can remember is that a dozen eggs, 2 loaves of bread, and a pack of milk cost her $10. Her statement can be both expressed and solved simultaneously in very simple mathematical terms – 12E+2B+1M=$10! 

The key to understanding math lies in getting the information and using it wisely. Your affinity for math will depend on how you use the mathematical information that you have at hand – it’s as simple as breaking down the information into smaller parts and making sketches to understand and then solve the problem! Re-read, go back and forth, and play with ideas to make math fun!

 

Take your time to make math look nice –

• Neat math work helps you think logically and your brain to comprehend information meticulously.
• Math is all about building on concepts and lots of practice. Learn one math idea at a time and practice enough so that you master the idea well, before proceeding to the next idea. 

Avoid skipping a certain section of a math concept because the fun of math lies in understanding it in its entirety. If you’re stuck at a math problem, go back to where it last made sense, and read and re-read to understand.

 

Improvise with math –

After you’ve mastered a math idea, spend some more time on it and try to come up with your own variations of acronyms and formulae to make math interesting. Math is fun because it’s more about knowing the ideas than remembering the formulae, unlike other subjects.

 

‘Math is fun’ facts –

• Do you know ‘Mathematics’ is an anagram of ‘me asthmatic’?
• Do you know what comes after a million, billion and trillion? – a quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion, septillion, octillion, nonillion, decillion and undecillion.
• Multiply any number with nine and then sum all individual digits of the product to make it a single digit, and the sum of all these individual digits would always be nine.
• Abacus is considered the origin of the calculator.
• 2 and 5 are the only prime numbers that end with a 2 or a 5.
• 12 + 3 - 4 + 5 + 67 + 8 + 9 = 100
• In 1995 in Taipei, citizens were allowed to remove ‘4’ from street numbers because it sounded like ‘death’ in Chinese. Many Chinese hospitals do not have a 4th floor.
• Remember the value of Pi (3.1415926) with this simple trick – count the number of letters in each word in the following sentence, 'May I have a large container of coffee?' and you have 3.1415926!