Top 14 Educational Games for Children – Your Kids Will Love These!

School, as important as it is, can also be very tedious. Especially for young minds thinking of nothing but the next breaktime and playing outside in the sun (which is also great and important, don’t get us wrong, but alas only accounts for a relatively short amount of school time). So how do you capture the minds and attention of your kids? How do you help them learn without boring them in the process? Give them an educational game, filled with challenges that reward cooperation as well as independent thought, that will make learning fun! We’ve put together a list of educational games that we think your kids will love and learn from.

Geometry Strategy

Recommended Age: 12+

The company who designed Geometry Strategy, BRIGHT of Sweden, has a deep-rooted tradition of making educational games for children, so it was hard for us to only pick one of them for our list. The game in question, Geometry Strategy, stood out as the best of the bunch due to its strategic depth and replayability. The game puts an interesting spin on one of the oldest strategic games out there – Chess.

The player’s goal is to bring the Sphere (a King-like piece) to the centre of the board while at the same time preventing other players from doing the same or from taking out his own sphere. For this task each player has 9 other pieces, each piece a figure of geometry with a different power level which can be used either for invading other players’ part of the board or for protecting their own. The depth of strategy and concentration required to play this may seem daunting at first, but this game more than makes up for it in the long run as every time you play it you can find new and unique strategies to reach your objective. And learning geometry is always more fun when you don’t even realise you’re doing it.

DIY Gamer Kit with Arduino

Recommended Age: 12+

The next game on our list is tailored more towards an older audience such as high school students as it requires a soldering kit, which can be a bit risky when left in the hands of a toddler (understatement of the year). It is a Do It Yourself kit which, when assembled, becomes a handheld games console. The DIY Gamer Kit assembly process helps youngsters gain significant knowledge in areas such as electronics, circuits and soldering, as well as coding skills later in the process when you code your creation to control a small LED screen. The Kit also comes with a couple of good old classic games, Snake and Pong, to make sure the fun continues even after it’s been assembled.

iWriteWords

Recommended Age: 2-6

We live in a technological world. Everybody and their toddler has a smartphone. So, whilst staring at a screen all day long is not healthy for a child, it is inevitable (and often innovative) for smart devices to be used as educational tools. One such app is iWriteWords, an interactive game for iPhones which teaches your kids to write in fun and easy ways. It is a game much like Connect the Dots, where you help your friend Mr. Crab write out words and collect rewards. It’s a fun exercise and it helps to teach your 5 year old how to write in an easy and stress free way.

Beasts of Balance

Recommended Age: 7+

You knew it was going to end up on our list eventually and here it is: Beasts of Balance. What better game to help develop your child’s motor skills? Stack beast upon beast and watch them evolve before you and turn into all kinds of fabulous creations. It provides you with a great way to improve dexterity while at the same time struggling to maintain the balance of the natural world which you are responsible for, laying the groundwork for an interest in environments, evolution and adaptation in the future. The game works for kids of all ages (and adults too!) with further depth and understanding achievable as children get older. It’s an engaging game that encourages cooperation and multitasking… and if you get bored of cooperating, well there’s always the new Battles expansion!

Code Monkey Island

Recommended Age: 8+

Code Monkey Island is the perfect example of a simple educational game which has much more to it than meets the eye. At first glance it has a simple objective: get your monkeys around the game board and into the centre where the sweet sweet bananas are. You do this through actions written on specific ‘Action Cards’ which you draw each turn. What makes this game so special is the way the instructions on these cards are presented. They are written in a specific way to be as similar as computer science algorithms as possible. So whilst your children are having fun, trying to reach the much coveted bananas, they are also unconsciously learning the foundations of computer science.

Toca Lab: Plants

Recommended Age: 3+

How do you get a child interested in science? The good people at Toca Boca seem to have found the answer in Toca Lab: Plants. It is a game of freedom, where you can do whatever you want and let your imagination run wild with no pressure.

The gameplay is simple, you move your plants around the lab, jumping from place to place, until you reach designated points where you can evolve them, or merge them together, or apart, unleashing your inner botanist! You can see that its creators understand children and love making educational games for them, and you can hear it in their words: ‘Everything we make is based on play. So each app requires some creativity and imagination to work. Also, you won’t find any high scores, levels, competition or predetermined stories. By staying true to this formula we allow each kid the freedom to play the way they want to.’

Outnumber

Recommended Age: 7+

Maths can be a weird subject, especially for 5 year olds, as it can be rather abstract. What is the number 7? How do you attach it to something tangible? The answers to these questions can be found in Outnumber. It is made up of 60 cards with the numbers from 1 to 20 on each one. Each number has its corresponding picture representing it and is also written down in letters and English and Hindi numerals. Those cards can be used for several different games, depending on the purpose for which you play them. You can play Match Up with only 20 cards to practice number recognition with your toddler or you can play more complex educational games with all the cards to practice things such as counting, sequencing and comparison and addition with older children.

BrainBox: The World

Recommended Age: 8+

Have you ever wanted to travel the world, visiting distant sites and wondering at the beauty of nature and of manmade structures? This game answers that calling. Containing 71 cards with beautiful illustrations of different sights, BrainBox: The World is the perfect educational game to spark the love of geography in the heart of your child. It is also a great game to train those memory muscles as the objectives of the game are to look at the cards for 10 seconds, trying to memorize as much as possible and to answer questions about the cards based on the roll of a die.

Orchard Toys: Match and Spell

Recommended Age: 4+

Learning to speak a language is hard work, yet children manage to pick speaking up with enviable ease. It’s reading, however, that can pose a trickier challenge. This is where Match and Spell shines. It is an educational game that is designed to help children learn how to read, to guide their thought in the right direction. The game is simple and consists of your child matching letters on little plastic blocks to form words and sentences. Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best ones.

Mapominoes: Europe

Recommended Age: 8+

Mapominoes is a great example of an old concept being rehashed and refreshed. It is based on the well known game of dominoes with the difference that the domino blocks are maps of different countries. The goal of this educational game is lay all your card by connecting them to others through common borders; a certain layer of strategy is needed to stop your opponents from playing their own cards and avoid becoming landlocked! You can learn more about the layout of Europe and of the neighbours each country has. It’s a short fun game that is great for learning geography… and for taking with you on tours of Europe. Also available with other countries and even UK counties!

CodeCombat

Recommended Age: 7+

Programming is one of those things that are hard to master but easy to learn, which is good because programming is also at the core of some of the most promising career paths of our time. This is where CodeCombat comes in, it is an online educational game designed to teach students how to type code and understand how computer logic works. It takes the old, tried and tested formula of an RPG – you control a fantasy character and level them up, find new gear for them and collect loot – and reinvigorates it with its own unique style of gameplay; you make your character move and fight by typing the actions that you want them to make in a separate coding screen.

What you are essentially doing is creating a small program at the beginning of each level which is then executed on the spot by your on-screen avatar. The program can be written in a coding language of your choice. The languages are fictional and made for the game, however they are designed to resemble other existing programming languages (PYTHON, JavaScript, etc.) and to emulate their internal logic and syntax. You start with a few commands allowing you to move your character and are slowly introduced to more as you tackle harder challenges. For these reasons CodeCombat is the perfect game to learn the fundamentals of programming.

DragonBox: Numbers

Recommended Age: 4-8

DragonBox: Numbers is an educational game designed to teach younger kids number sense – the intuitive understanding of what numbers are, how they work and how you can use them. In it you play with the Nooms – furry rectangular creatures, each with a different length representing the numbers from one to ten. Your kid can learn how to add and subtract by combining smaller Nooms to create larger ones or separating big Nooms into tinier parts. The main feature of the game is its puzzle mode where you have to regroup the Nooms in order to fit them in boxes their size. There is also a sandbox mode where there are no tasks, no time limits, no pressure, just simple addition and subtraction by using Nooms. DragonBox: Numbers is a fun and stress-free game, great for teaching a kid to count.

Rory’s Story Cubes

Recommended Age: 7+

 

Rory’s Story Cubes is a pocket-sized creative story generator. It consists of 9 unique dice. Each has pictures engraved on its sides and no two are the same. The rules of the game are simple – you roll the dice and then you make your own story using the images that the dice has landed on. It is a great educational game for Literacy Development as it encourages the player to speak and improvise. It helps young children get more accustomed to spoken language and become better at forming coherent sentences, paragraphs and stories. It boosts creativity and problem solving as each set of rolls presents the player with unique challenges and storytelling opportunities. And with the millions of ways that the dice can align you can be sure that each playthrough will feel fresh and unique.

Monkey Word School Adventure

Recommended Age: 3-7

 

What separates Monkey Word School Adventure from the rest of its competition is the diversity of the content it provides. It is a educational game app for smartphones which aims to increase your kid’s understanding of language through a series of fun games. It is made up of 6 mini-games such as: Spelling Stone – where you help the titular monkey by spelling out words using a set amount of letters; Phonics Bridge – where you help two fluffy chinchillas reach each other by building a bridge using the engineering power of phonics; and Rhyming Maze where you draw a path by connecting the words that rhyme. The difficulty of each next level is determined by your child’s performance in the previous one. This provides for a smoother learning curve for children who find a particular mode difficult and a faster learning experience for those who find it easy. Approved by teachers, this game is the perfect companion to your child’s early-years education.

This sums up Sensible Object’s list of fun and educational games for children. We love all of these games, but of course have a special place in our heart for Beasts of Balance, which blends physical and digital play in a way unlike any other game, and allows kids to learn strategic thinking, cooperative play, and coordination in fun, engaging ways.

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