Serious Games For Nintendo DS: Learn Series

Via: Future-Making Serious Games – Dreamcatcher Interactive Expands Its Learn Series Of Educational Titles For The Nintendo DS

Games publisher Dreamcatcher Interactive has announced Learn Geography, an educational title for the Nintendo DS aimed at students between the first and fourth grades to be released on November 17, 2009.  There are currently four titles in all, read more.

In our household – Lego Batman

Lego Batman is the latest installment in the Lego series of video games developed by Traveler’s Tales.  My son and I have found it to be the most entertaining of the Lego titles, even better than Lego Star Wars.  Lego Batman is the first original storyline of the series and the first time you can play the game from both sides of the story – heroes and villains.  We found it fun to play the game through with plot-holes as the heroes and play it again as the villains watching the story come together.  I believe this is the first time my son has ever seen this style of storytelling.

Like all the Lego games, Lego Batman has great cooperative game play and puzzle solving.  My son and I have a blast trying to figure out who must do what, which suit must be worn (there are different suits with different, specialized abilities), and in what order things must be done.  The puzzles help my son build cognitive thinking skills, but my favorite aspect of the puzzles is the interaction we have together. They force us to think and work together towards a common goal.  We have a great time playing these games and I believe we both will cherish the memories.

On the reverse side, Lego Batman continues the series’ tradition of, at times, being extremely frustrating.  Depth perception is the biggest issue.  It can be difficult to tell if you are in the right position for a jump or to push a box.  Repeated failures can be aggravating.  As I’ve posted before, the aggravation provides a great opportunity to teach frustration management.  After playing these games for two years now I see a marked improvement in my son’s ability to deal with frustration.  It is now me that often needs to be reminded of the lesson.  If the depth perception is off, and I die repeatedly because of it, I often let out an ‘arrrrrrrgh!’  My son sets me straight and sympathizes with me.  ‘I know, it’s frustrating,’ he says.  Makes me smile every time.

Learning Opportunities

During the story, there are several places where Robin wears a vacuum suit.  He must vacuum 25 Legos and put them in a machine, the machine then creates something that will allow the heroes to advance.  This is a great opportunity to teach children about adding to 25.  Robin vacuums groups of Legos at a time.  The total amount of Legos vacuumed is displayed on his back. When my son plays Robin I would ask him two questions after each group.

1. How many Legos does Robin have?
2. How many Legos does Robin still need?

I was worried that doing this constantly, disrupting the game play, would upset him.  So I did it the first few times, then asked him randomly after that.  One day we switched characters – I played Robin and he was Batman.  I was pleasantly surprised to find he stopped me after each section and asked ‘OK, now how many Legos do you have?’  After my answer he’d say ‘Right! And how many more do you need?’  After my answer he’d say ‘Right!’ again and we’d move on.  To make sure he was paying attention to my answers, I answered one incorrectly.  He paused, but then said ‘…riiiight’ and went on.  I laughed and said ‘No, that’s not right!’ and told him the correct answer.  To which he said ‘Oh yeah!’ and we played on.  At the age of 5, I’ll take the slight pause, but overall trust in his Father as a good thing.

While I do believe the game offers excellent learning opportunities through puzzles and mathematics, the power of it is in the excitement received from playing.  The trick is to harness that energy to practical uses in the real world.   So while playing Lego Batman I kept an eye out for subjects in the game that could be applied to real-world education.

Counting by 5′s – The Legos Robin vacuums often come in groups of five.  I not only quizzed my son on counting to twenty five, but I began teaching him how to count by fives.  Here are a few sites that can help.

Lesson Plan – Mathwire.com – Skip counting by 5′s.

Flash Game – LearningPlanet.com – The Counting Game.

How Batman and Robin’s Boomerangs work, or don’t work .

How Robin’s Vacuum suit works.

How Batman’s Jet Pack works.

How Batman’s hang glider works.

How Batman’s wing suit works (if you decide to think of it as a winged suit instead).

ESRB Rating: Everyone 10+

AGEd Tested: 5 Years

Academic Benefits:

• Mathmatics
• Puzzle Solving

Social Benefits:

• Cooperative gameplay

Nintendo Donating 80 DSes, Games For Math Education

Nintendo of America will donate 80 Nintendo DS systems and copies of of its Personal Trainer: Math software to nonprofit math education organization Mathcounts.

As an incentive to increase membership to its club programs, Mathcounts will give away 20 handhelds and Personal Trainer: Math copies to four randomly-selected middle schools with at least 12 participating students in their Mathcounts clubs.  Read more.

Daily computer game boosts maths

Playing a daily computer game has helped a class of primary school children improve their maths and concentration, a study says.

The children played the game every day for 10 weeks with “dramatic” results.

A class from the Dundee school took part in the project to show how computer games can enhance and build on classroom learning.  Read more.

In our household – Lego Star Wars

Lego Star Wars (LSW) – The Complete Saga. LSW allows people to play through all six episodes of the Star Wars Saga. Each episode is broken into chapters and each chapter loosely follows the storyline of the corresponding movie.

My son was first introduced to LSW at three years and nine months of age,while visiting friends. My son asked to play a game on their XBOX 360. Not having any kid friendly games at the time our friends downloaded the demo for LSW off XBOX Live. The demo left little impression on me. There was no tutorial and the object seemed non-existent or way to simple, in other words, we didn’t know what we were doing.

The next day my son asked to play at our house. I wasn’t thrilled with the idea, having found the game pointless, but it did have excellent two player gameplay and at the very least allowed me to play with him, rather than just stand over his shoulder and watch.

It’s amazing how the second time around things make a lot more sense. We discovered that bricks bouncing on the ground were intended to be built and more times than not, created necessary tools used by the characters to complete each level. We also discovered Jedi’s can use the force to move, create or destroy objects. Each level was not a mindless exploration of the world, but a puzzle needing to be solved to gain access to the next part of the story.

We finished the first level of episode IV with smiles on our faces. A cut screen at the end of the episode showed princess leia captured and being threatened with the destruction of her home world. Not believing the threats leia mumbles, ‘blah, blah, blah’ and motions her hand in similar fashion. The empire proceeds to destroy her world and leia is left crying…and me laughing. For those of us old enough to have seen the original movies…again and again and again…the cut scenes will provide much laughter as they playfully mock characters and scenes to help bring the story together. Kids however will be left asking ‘What’s so funny Daddy?’ It’s OK, let it be your little secret.

Needless to say, not only was my son excited about the game, but so was I. We had found a game both Father and Son enjoyed to play, and better yet, could have fun, while working together to complete puzzles within the game.

I ran out and purchased ‘Lego Star Wars II – The Original Trilogy’ for XBOX 360. We have since purchased “Lego Star Wars – The Complete Saga’ for Nintendo DS and Nintendo Wii systems. The DS system allows us to play anywhere we are and comes with extra mini-puzzles to challenge my son. The Wii version allows my son to play at home, and at his grandparents, yes his grandparents own a Wii.

The game helps children learn character recognition, puzzle solving and cooperative gameplay.

ESRB Rating: Everyone 10+

AGEd Tested: 3 years 9 Months

Academic Benefits:

• Puzzles
• Cause and effect associations
• Character recognition

Social Benefits:

• Teamwork – Two Player