Via: Fun4theBrain - Bringing Education and Fun Together
Fun4theBrain.com is a great collection of totally free, original, high-quality, flash-based interactive games.
All the games are developed by Natasha Oliver (Exuberant Games) and she has done a marvelous job. Each game goes through important information for a certain subject matter.
The site has dedicated sections to Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication and Division. Games include Aquatic Speedway, Pizza Pizzazz, Math Models, Math Monsters, Snowball Fight, Patty's Paints, Color Creations, Super Stars and more.
Here’s a screenshot of a division game!
Panda Mayhem - This fun English game has some silly pandas to help teach the parts of speech.
The activities won’t TEACH concepts but are good for review and reinforcement, and could be easily utilized as a whole-class interactive activity. Scores are kept and reported at the end so kids can track their progress. If they get the answers right, they will earn rewards such as new clothes for a dress-up-doll or new colors for a coloring page.
The math games are great if you need to review your math facts. And
Be sure to check out the new games for other subjects:
- English games to review parts of speech
- Reading games to help learn sight words
- Science games on how Oxygen and Nitrogen work together
Coming soon to this area will be tutorials that will teach the facts, not just review them. Different styles of learning will be taken into account when the tutorials are created.
Posted by Natasha Oliver @ her Blog Fun4theBrain Chatter
Games To Teach or Entertain?
“As I design each of my games, I need to consider the weight of both the education portion and the game portion. I want kids to want to play the games, but I want the teachers and parents to want to let them play the games. Too much fun, very little education and review seems to happen. But, too much education, and the kids do not want to play the game.”
“So, where is the magical line. Recently I have been trying a new method with some of my math games. When they are working on the math that is all they do. There are some fun graphics, but not a ton of interaction and movement. However, once they finish a certain number of math problems correctly, they get the reward of playing a game. I have found that some sort of time limit is required on those sections or the kids will never get back to the math.”
“So far my most popular games of this style are my platform games. Super Stars and Beach Rush both use the reward of climbing through a platform game, similar to Mario Bros style, as their motivation to do their math problems. Before the student finishes their game levels, or their lives, they will have finished at least 30 math problems. At this point, these have been quite popular.”
“I am looking forward to trying different methods to combine the fun and education. I will keep you posted as to what I come up with for my experiments.”