Current Status of Online Educational Games For Preschool Kids
Posted: Sunday, April 05, 2009
by Mike Smith
This article is written based on an extensive search in trying to find something healthy, informative, and equally fun for preschool, kindergarten and first grade kids to do online for a limited amount of time on a daily basis. In this article, we look at what parents want for their preschool and kindergarten kids vs what they actually get?
Parents generally want their children to get used to computers at a young age, but not get addicted to the same. Hence the "limited amount of time" is a key requirement to any young children's website.
Parents also expect that the website should be generally healthy and suitable for kids. The website should teach the kids the essential concepts of early child-hood education, such as, numbers, alphabets, analytics etc. It is a huge plus, if the kids are taught in a subtle and entertaining manner, without giving them a burdened feeling that they need to learn. Such a fun learning approach, goes a long way in addressing their generally short attention spans. In other words, the kids should learn while thoroughly enjoying the time spent on the website. Research has shown, that this is, quite an effective way to motivate kids to learn.
Of course, in the fast paced world today, most parents are busy with both parents working. In such a scenario, the website needs to be able to engage the young kids without the parents necessarily having to baby sit them along.
The bottom line is that TV engages kids, but a well designed children's website should be able to engage and interact with the kids much more effectively, while imparting the needed learning.
What do parents actually get?
To our surprise, our search showed that not many sites came close to the above expectations. Here are some of the things we found on the web for children, based on our extensive survey.
One thing that our search revealed is that there are several social networking websites for kids. Most parents of preschoolers or first graders wouldn't feel comfortable with their kids doing social networking in the virtual world. A sensible parent would want their kids to do social networking in the real world before they could experiment with the virtual world. It is unfair and unhealthy for the kids to get hooked onto the virtual worlds at such a young age.
The search also exposed a huge number of websites offering online educational games, with a lot of ad-hoc content and flash based games that were rather unorganized. Looking at such content, one easily comes to the conclusion that parents have to spend a lot of time trying to organize and present content and educational games to their kids, so that the kids would get something meaningful out of it. This means that parents have to baby sit them on a daily basis and put in a lot of a-priori homework on their part.
The other common thing we found was that most of the content, actually do not "teach" any new concepts to the kid. They generally assume that kids know the concepts and proceed directly to test them. This puts more burden on the parents to come up with effective ways to teach the required concepts to the kids. This is one of the biggest shortcomings of online educational games for preschool and first grade children.
If you are a parent and you have the nominal requirements for your kid's early education and fun learning, as outlined above, there are a few websites that meet some or all of these requirements. One such website for online educational games, for preschool, kindergarten and first grade kids is Raylit (http://www.raylit.com)
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Top-level comments on this article: (2 total)Interesting article, i have two young children and although they do not go on the computer a lot, i certainly would not feel comfortable with them going on social networking sites. At the moment they generally use Cbeebies, Nikelodeon or specific websites for they favourite programmes. These do contain some fun learning games. But it would be nice if there was another alternative.
Thanks for the comment Samuel. I totally hear you on the social networking aspect. If you want another meaningful alternative for your kids, do try out the fun educational games and videos at Raylit.
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