So to start out this post let me give you a background to what I have been working on for the past 5 months. I have always wanted to have games on my website and have asked numerous teachers and parents with surveys. If you are one of the people who took my survey I thank you immensely. My love for technology has always pushed me to want to make a cool game that is fun, interactive and most importantly educational. Over the past 4 months I have worked with several programmers and even learned some programming on my own (scary).
While working with all the different designs of math games and talking with numerous educators I have come to realize that for my website quizzes are more important than games right now. I know what you are saying – But dude you have the word games listed on the top of your website. I do have the word games listed for several reasons most of which have to do with the fact that many kids have diseases called quizzitis – (symptoms show itself when the kids see the word quiz and promptly causes sweating and tension) So to prevent tons of sweaty kids who are tense in the classroom I have disguised the quizzes under the title games.
Now for my thoughts on quizzes vs games and why I chose to start making quizzes first. I have seen many kids play some really cool educational games or watch educational shows but unfortunately I find that the kids look for the flashy (term meaning awesome in child language) fun stuff and many of the games offer about 40% learning and 60% fun. Now I believe this is fine and there are no problems with this but I see all too often that the kids start to want to only play games that are flashy and fun. This makes it difficult to have them use websites that do not have as much wow factor to them but are very educational.
The other difference I have seen in the children is their ability to sit down and focus on something that needs to be done but is considered boring. Even in my own kids I see that they ask if they can play the “fun” games instead of doing what was asked of them. This is another issue with games but do not get me wrong that I believe games are good and can be made very educational. There are tons of pros to games but sometimes kids need to sit down and learn the math the old fashioned way as I mention in my salad and math post.
So here is what I have done with my quizzes on the website. I have tried to make them fun by adding cool videos if they get the right answers. When a correct answer is chosen something cool happens and when a wrong answer is chosen something not so cool happens. I even feel like I have outsmarted the kids because sometimes when they get the wrong answer I will have a video play that shows how to get the right answer. Yes, I know I am very smart, this took years of research to realize this (really only took several surveys).
Quizzes in and of itself are still not going to be as fun as interactive games but I know that my main focus is the videos and this is just a supplement to use. I hope that you enjoy the quizzes/games I have out there. I would love suggestions if you have any. If you are a teacher or home school parent and have a list of questions you have made that you want to go through with your class on the projector send me a list of the questions and I will put them in a quiz for you to review in class. Happy Quizzing (yes I know that is not a real term)
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