Sharing the Addiction

Twitter always sends me to interesting places and one of the last sites it sent me to was one called Tutput. On this site, you can sign up for a teacher account and then set up a registration for children to sign up with that will make them part of your online class. Then the children can play games against children all over the world who are logged in at the same time. I pretended to be a kid so that I could test it out and felt bad as I was teamed up against what were probably real kids somewhere else. Still, I soundly lost the first match. Of course, I selected the hardest level of multiplication just to see what this looked like and my first question was 49×27. I was busy trying to work this out in my head rather than on paper and in the meantime my component had solved three questions!

I then tried a couple of easier level activities and soundly walloped the poor children I was against (sorry kids but you’re got to learn to toughen up in life!) I think this would be VERY popular in the classroom and each time you win, a summary of the game gets put onto your win wall. There is also a graduation board which shows you which game levels you have completed. As per usual, all of this makes me wish I had a class to try this with!

Tags: Games, tutpup

From the same design company that created Samorost 1 and 2 (with 2 being more appropriate educationally) comes another Flash based game designed specifically as an educational game for children. This game has been commissioned by the BBC and is available on their Bitesize Revision website. Thanks to Allanah King for bringing this to my attention through her blog.

You move through eight levels with each level having a set theme for the questions and graphics such as genres and writing, numeracy, and the sciences. You have to first click items or characters within the level to cause a chain of events that will get one of the characters within the level to start asking you questions. This is often a big puzzle in itself – one level that seemed particularly difficult to get started with was one that had a cat in it and my clue to you is that the cat is the key. With each correct answer, you get more hot air in your balloon which, when full, takes you up to the next level. With each incorrect answer, you loose some of the hot air. This would be really motivating for kids (my husband played it right through all eight levels after he saw it sitting open on the screen and he is a big kid!)