Education Through Games

My kids are big into their tech. 

It’s been fun watching my daughter develop her skills with my phone or iPad, and more recently, the Switch. Practically everything she can do she learned herself through trial and error, with just a little nudge from watching me. She knows the PIN code to access my phone and iPad and can get to the apps she wants and jump between them. 

When Covid hit, I invested in some good art programs and educational apps for her to discover. My favourite is a very colourful and engaging app to teach programming that builds in complexity at a very manageable scale. Ada really loves it. I watched her start by randomly placing the instructions until she got the little critter to its home, and move to understanding the effects of the various commands and place them correctly. As the game goes on, they add new commands she has to experiment with to discover their result. 

We still try to limit their screen time over a week, but some days they spend more time on them than others. At least it’s partially educational. 

EDIT: I had to manually adjust the date so that this post appears as a November Post. The clock on my blog is still set to Ireland time, so it initially showed up as a December 1st entry. It’s still very much November 30th where I am, though. It also means that all previous posts show up as a day late, but I’m less concerned about that.