Fun4theBrain - This School Year

Quick summary of what is in this Start of the School Year message:
- new games
- old games
- a whole new world (don't you dare close your eyes haha)
 Keep reading for more details....

Ten years ago, I started creating educational games and sharing them on my website. Back then it was called Exuberant Games! Then, on March 12, 2009, I opened Fun4theBrain! After over 24 million visitors and 250 million game plays, Fun4theBrain is still here! The past 8 years have had many ups and downs and brought many drastic changes in technology. With these changes comes the need for Fun4theBrain to alter how it does things. While I would love to keep things the same, technology will not allow me to grow stagnant, and that is a good thing. So, I am off to learn new programming languages so that you will be able to play Fun4theBrain games everywhere.

Old Games - I will be converting my old games into HTML5 compliant formats as quickly as I can. I am still hoping to be able to complete a new game each month, but it may be a month and a half with an updated game in between each.

New Games - I am going to do my best to keep you informed of smaller progress so you all can be as excited about the new games as I am. I have started using a productivity program called Productive Flourishing. It is awesome and basically made for creatives who tend to have a few too many ideas running through their heads at all times. It encourages to stick with a project until there is a sharable. So, I will be attempting this now. Because of this, expect more posts and updates on the games on which I am working. I plan on sharing artwork and game ideas as I work through my normal creative process. I do hope you enjoy hearing about what goes into each of these educational games.

A Whole New World - I know how much we all love Murb; those little monsters are just so cute! With the technology changes, it will be a massive undertaking to re-do that entire town, but it will eventually get done. But, there is something new around the corner! This new world deserves a blog post all its own, so stay tuned for more information next week! (I am really excited and can't wait to share the news with you!!)

So, there you have it. This school year you can expect old math games made new, new educational games with lots of updates along the way, and a whole new world beginning! Tell your friends and enjoy Fun4theBrain!

Games to Teach or Entertain?

As I design each of my games, I need to consider the weight of both the education portion and the game portion. I want kids to want to play the games, but I want the teachers and parents to want to let them play the games. Too much fun, very little education and review seems to happen. But, too much education, and the kids do not want to play the game.

So, where is the magical line. Recently I have been trying a new method with some of my math games. When they are working on the math, that is all they do. There are some fun graphics, but not a ton of interaction and movement. However, once they finish a certain number of math problems correctly, they get the reward of playing a game. I have found that some sort of time limit is required on those sections or the kids will never get back to the math.

So far my most popular games of this style are my platform games. Super Stars and Beach Rush both use the reward of climbing through a platform game, similar to Mario Bros style, as their motivation to do their math problems. Before the student finishes their game levels, or their lives, they will have finished at least 30 math problems. At this point, these have been quite popular.

I am looking forward to trying different methods to combine the fun and education. I will keep you posted as to what I come up with for my experiments.