Driving Kids - Free Online Educational Games for Kids

Why don’t children like to tell their parents of their failures? We think in some cases the youngsters afraid not of punishment, but of appearing to be “bad kids” in front of their parents. When we’re talking about failures at school, however, parents most likely need to know the truth.

“Parents to get online access to kids’ marks, attendance records,” the Sault Star informs us. Parent Assistant, an online program, will allow parents to “log on and view a student’s attendance records, credit accumulation, mid-term and final marks.” This novelty affects students under 18 in secondary schools under the charge of the Rainbow District School Board (Ontario, Canada). Representatives of the board said that the purpose of this initiative is “to engage parents in conversations with their children about how school is going.”

What do you think, should these officials take student attitudes about this move into consideration? Should elementary schools offer a similar service for parents? And, from another point of view, should an educational online game implement similar features? If we were to introduce a special parental account on Driving Kids, allowing parents to keep an eye on their children’s activities, messages, achievements and so on, would you use these features? Please share your thoughts with us!

Read more! Not sitting somewhere in a quiet place and drinking coffee a la Hemingway, but in your children’s bedroom when kids make cozy nests in their beds, after a day full of games… Don’t you know why?

As The Guardian writes, researchers from the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) in the U.K. are following about 19,000 children from infancy to school. This longitudinal survey has brought many interesting results this year, and one of them showed that “…children whose parents read to them every day at the age of three were more likely to flourish in their first year in primary school, getting more than two months ahead not just in language and literacy but also in maths.”

If you feel sad that you haven’t given your kids enough care and attention, don’t forget that you always have the chance to work off your guilt, at least in part. One way might be to show children opportunities for self-development using computers and the Internet. Let them know about educational websites and free educational games. And don’t forget to play online together!

As spring nears closer, American First Lady Michelle Obama has launched the Let’s Move! campaign. The campaign, as proclaimed on the Let’s Move! site, has a goal “to solve the epidemic of childhood obesity within a generation.”

One of the campaign’s components is to make sure that children engage in physical activity. While they need one hour of active play daily, “…8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 ½ hours to using entertainment media including TV, computers, video games, cell phones and movies in a typical day,” as reported on the Let’s Move! website.

We undoubtedly agree that the situation described above is abnormal and extremely unhealthy. But if we try to solve it by keeping children off the computer, we risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Parents, teachers, and others whom children trust are still able to turn a “bad” computer into a useful educational tool.

Ultimately, we have to face the truth: prohibiting a child from using computers is hardly an accomplishable mission in the 21st century. From our point of view, playing free educational games for a few minutes a day isn’t the worst-case scenario for kids’ computer use. Thus, we would love to invite the First Lady and her daughters to check out an educational game for kids called Driving Kids.

Might the First Lady decide that playing educational games is a worthy way for children to use computers? Would she allow her daughters, Malia Ann and Natasha, to spend some free time on Driving Kids? If her answer to at least one of our questions is positive, it would most likely be one of the most important and significant appraisals that any online game for kids has ever had.

P.S. By the way, our fidelity to the concept of moving is pretty clear: we are Driving Kids, aren’t we?

Guess in which EU capital the quietest children live? Not long ago it used to be Berlin. The reason for kids’ quietness was neither their character nor their parents, but the law. The situation was changed only this month. “Children in the German capital Berlin are to be exempt from strict laws on noise pollution,” the BBC writes. “Until now, only church bells, emergency sirens, snow-ploughs and tractors have fallen outside the stringent rules on excessive noise in Germany.” However, it’s still better to keep quiet at night and on Sundays.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but the topic of reducing kids’ talkativeness was also brought up last week at the website of a certain free educational game, one by the name of Driving Kids . “We don’t think that’s a game you can win,” commented the specialists in online children’s games.

Even if we weren’t the ones who inspired German politicians to make the change, we’re glad that kids in Berlin may meet spring 2010 with happy shouts, drums, jumps, and whistles, playing games and expressing their emotions more freely.

Do you know your kids’ favorite TV show or movie? Or their favorite actors, musicians, books…?

Look at the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards 2010 nominees and you’ll see the stars that shine in your children’s world. Kids themselves will be able to vote beginning February 25 on the Nickelodeon website. By the way, this ceremony is “the only awards show where kids get to vote on their favorite stars, movies, TV shows, music and entertainment,” notes the children’s website kidglue.com.

Among 19 nominee categories, computer games and websites are not well represented: there’s only the category of “Favorite Video Game,” with popular children’s games The Legend of Zelda, Mario Kart, Wii Fit and Wii Sports Resort as the nominees.

But what about a “Favorite Online Game” category?

Incidentally: what cool games for kids do you know?

The younger you are, the more receptive you are. That’s why children are easily influenced by any kind of books, films or games they encounter, no matter the genre or when it was created. And now it’s time to look through the things which contribute to kids’ identity.

“Computer games and comics are to be analysed alongside the time-honoured classics of children’s literature at a new Cambridge University centre,” the BBC writes. The director of the new center observed, “It’s easy to say that these things are just kids’ fashions or that they’re trash, but I don’t believe that’s good enough.”

We are great fans of the research of the new center, aimed at the psychology of modern kids and also at their expectations for educational online games. We hope it helps parents, teachers and also online games’ creators to understand children and their tastes better.

Is your child so talkative that his or her voice rings in your ears even when you sleep? Do teachers beg you to do something to make him or her quiet as a lamb? There’s no need to get on your kid’s case (we don’t think that’s a game you can win). Play it safe, just help them start chatting in a useful way! Take, for example, T-Bone Productions in North Carolina (USA).

“Online radio show lets kids be the DJs,” writes CITIZEN-TIMES.com. “The two 11-year-olds were the co-hosts of a new kids radio show in Asheville … The program airs 8-10 a.m. Saturday mornings on the online-only station AshevilleFM.org.” Owing to this, while kids develop their communication skills, parents may regard their young chatterboxes as rising radio stars.

What if Driving Kids offered its players the option to sing karaoke and share their singing with other players and parents? Would you allow your children to take part in such an activity in our online game? Would you like for us to organize an online singing competition or something similar? Let us know what you think!

An online game may be more than just an online game. Many thought so, but few were able to prove it…until the article “PBS Kids teaches biology in an online game” was posted by USA TODAY. The article covered the free online game “Lifeboat to Mars” for children aged 8-12. The game aims to “make learning biology fun for kids,” proposing that they “help rebuild the on-board ecosystems.”

Driving Kids believes that younger students, even if they are five years old, should also have opportunities to be educated in the natural sciences while playing online games for kids. This is the reason why in Driving Kids, children can feed hedgehogs with growing mushrooms, remove trash from water and harvest apples using a small truck; online games with these activities are free for all Driving Kids members.

If English is not the only language that your child speaks, be ready if he or she understands more than you expect. “Bilingualism accentuates children’s conversational understanding”: this aspect of cross-cultural interaction was noticed in research conducted by M. Siegal (University of Sheffield, UK) and his colleagues from Italy, the U.K. and Japan. It showed that bilingual children aged 3-6 demonstrated heightened sensibility to “violations of conversational maxims” (that is, maxims of quantity, quality, relation, manner and politeness).

In case you want to assist your child to make their first steps in interacting with foreign children, try Driving Kids’ mini-chat! Embedded in an online game, the mini-chat provides kids from any part of the world with a virtual playground for enjoying games and communication. The first lesson: es ist schön, n’est-ce pas?*

* Es ist schön (Germ.) – it’s nice; n’est-ce pas (Fr.) – isn’t it?

If you have found your child in front of a monitor when he or she is supposed to be doing homework, don’t hurry to switch the computer off. Because your child might be doing exactly the things you wanted him or her to be doing! “A study carried out in the UK for technology company Microsoft showed 37% of secondary pupils used computers for study every day at home,” the BBC reports. According to the survey, computers are less popular at school than at home: in classrooms they are used by only 30% of students daily.

But even if you have found your child lightheartedly playing online games, still don’t hurry to switch the kids’ games off. You may want to look in the mirror first: the study shows that 71% of young people and 65% of parents list computers among their favorite leisure time activities.

Which online interests do you and your child have in common? Driving Kids would love for you to share your own family’s experience!