Sylvan Learning Launches Educational Games for the Post-Kindergarten Crowd
Want to teach little Johnny or Sally how to recite the alphabet or to count to 10? App stores are awash with fun educational games that teach toddlers basic learning skills.
Once kids hit the ripe old age of 5, though, parents’ app choices diminish. Sylvan Learning, a supplemental K-12 educational company with more than 800 locations across North America, wants to serve that market.
Today Sylvan launched SylvanPlay, a mobile games network focused on educational apps for grades 1 through 4. The network will feature nine games initially, with more to come later this year.
This is Sylvan’s first foray into educational apps, and the games launched today run the gamut of core curriculum skills, from basic arithmetic and geometry to language, history and science.
In Critter Cruise, for example, kids pack up the Woodie and get their kicks on Route 66, picking up four-legged hitchhikers and passing historical markers along the way. When they run out of gas, they’ll have to answer a brief language or math quiz to fill ’er up.
In the arcade-style Angle Asteroids, kids must point their blasters at the appropriate angle to destroy oncoming space objects. Don’t look now, but here comes the sun.
Pizza Party teaches fractions and basic math by asking kids to give a portion of a pizza to Dr. Potato, to divide candies between two characters or to add and subtract cupcakes.
In Sushi Scramble, up to four players compete to build words by taking letters from an oval-shaped river of alphabet nigiri.
Other titles include Get Rocky (a geology game starring a family of moles), Battle Station (players use basic math to estimate the location of enemy submarines), and Not Lost in the Universe (kids marooned on Planet Blarp learn how to use renewable energy sources).
Parents whose children attend a Sylvan Learning Center can track their kids’ progress on a dashboard shared across all the games they’ve downloaded; kids can use the dashboard to connect with other players in the network and exchange messages with them. (Non-Sylvans can also access the dashboard but won’t be able to track kids’ progress.)
The apps are all free to download. Sylvan plans to make money from in-app purchases, for things like new routes in Critter Cruise or five-letter words in Sushi Scramble. They’ll range from 99 cents to $4.99 apiece. Customers whose kids attend Sylvan will receive in-app upgrades free of charge.
Sylvan says parents will be asked to verify each purchase by entering a simple three-digit code — a fairly low barrier for kids to circumvent, especially on Android devices that don’t require a passcode for every in-app purchase.
(Now would be a good time to check whether you’ve allowed in-app purchases from iTunes or Google Play, and either password-protect them or turn them off.)
As for the games themselves, they’re clever enough, but still a bit on the young side. Your 6-year-old will probably enjoy feeding pizza to a potato a lot more than your 9-year-old, who is probably already lost in the more sophisticated worlds of Minecraft or Roblox.
Questions, complaints, kudos? Email Dan Tynan at ModFamily1@yahoo.com.
