May

8

Game Day: Arcademic Skill Builders

Filed Under English, Games, Math, Social Studies 

Arcademic Skill Builders is an awkwardly named site that has a host of simple little Flash games that try to teach academic concepts. The games are bright, colorful, and simple suggesting they’re aimed mainly at elementary kids. A casual look at the site suggests that Social Studies, Math and Language Arts are the two subjects that receive most of the attention.

I gave a quck run through Capital Penguin where I had to make my penguin jump to the ice floe that represented the state matching the capital on the bottom of the screen. It was reasonably entertaining (though the music was annoying), but I have only one complain.

The ice floes did not have the name of the state in question, but only the two letter abbreviation. Being a Canadian and not completely at ease with state abbreviations, this led to a couple of mistakes on my part. Since the site seems to be aimed at younger kids, I’m left to wonder whether it’s most important to know the full name of a state or its abbreviation. If I had to pick one, I’d rather my students could spell out the state in full. Maybe that’s just me.

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