Study through play

Today’s children are familiar with computers from a very young age. Sometimes they can be much better at manipulating a mouse and keyboard than they are at using an ordinary pen. This is probably not healthy: familiarising a child with a computer should be done gradually, keeping a judicious balance between virtual and “real” games. Nevertheless, there is on the market today a vast number of game programmes of all kinds aimed at children, including children of pre-school age: entertaining games, educational games, games for teaching at whatever level. These are the kind of programmes for children we are talking about.

In the pre-computer era the only “developmental” games for children were those aimed at developing this or that skill: for example, linguistic, logical, associative (developing the child’s memory and speed of thought), and so on. Whole collections appeared, full of various instructional tasks for the child to complete: colouring-books, story-blocks, picture-lotto and various other games.

The arrival of the computer in our everyday lives has brought additional possibilities for the creation and use of developmental games. To mention two – in our view significant – advantages of a computer game: firstly, it can say at once to its “partner” whether he or she has completed the assigned task correctly; and secondly, it can offer a number of variants on a task of whatever type (in contrast to non-computer games and books, where the number of tasks is limited).

What sorts of things can be learned through games? – the rules of one’s mother tongue or of a foreign language; memory; an ear for music; the perception of form and colour, and much, much else. The most important thing is that the creators of the programme should clearly understand what kind of educational task they are setting, and provide the user with decisions that correspond to this task. Also important, of course, is the aesthetic appearance of the programme, ease of use, and – most of all – tasks which will be interesting for children and which they will be really eager to complete. Such programmes are already on the market in Russia. We, for our part, would like to show you some of our educational and developmental programmes for children. We hope that you like them.