Whether it comes to learning math, reading, programming or sports, we don’t believe just in quality time. We like great big, heaps of quantity time. Our games are like comic books. They are fun to play, they aren’t big budget, they have a story and characters, and they come out regularly.
We hit on the comic book idea when the reviews from our first group of testers came in – six classrooms, several children of friends and family and one mixed martial arts world champion (she’s a relative). They wanted MORE games. They also wanted side quests – you know, the game version of those pages in the middle of the comic book that were jokes, or a mini-story about a different character.
There are those teachers (and parents) who think comic books are a bad thing. There are others, including us, who think that any time a child is reading it can be positive. They learn new words, they learn sight recognition of words they already know, which is super important.
Being a poor reader is a vicious circle. A person doesn’t recognize the words, has to sound them out or look them up and so reading takes a really long time to get to the point and is difficult and boring so the person doesn’t read enough to recognize very many words by sight so has to sound them out ….
The same occurs with math. Take calculation, for example, which often gets a bad rap. While we do agree that it’s fine to use calculators to compute the square root of 729 (which is 27, in case you were dying to know) being able to add, multiply and estimate in your head quickly can make lots of math problems easier which makes math more fun which makes you do more of it which … well, you get the idea.
Just like pictures made comic books more fun to read, our video clips, thanks to our wonderful artist and animator (Justin and Danny, take a bow) make the game more fun. We show clips of different fishing spots and then our graph shows how we added up the number of each type of fish. Then, players go go (virtually) fish in them, which the Ojibwe and Dakota did NOT do with fishing poles that they bought at the Bass Mega-store. How did they do it? Well, I guess you’ll need to play one of our upcoming games, Buffalo Trail or Fish Lake to find out. Oh, but you have to pass the math challenge for the first level before you can get into that part of the game.
Read more about our upcoming game and game subscription here.