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Comment by onemoresoop | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to work with people who want to create free educative games for kids, games fun enough to keep kids playing while developing their brains in positive ways. Most games I found are infested with ads (hence not free), sprinkled with lots of dark patters and the games are not good enough I'd even pay for them. Maybe there are some free gems out there already but are quite hard to find. My kid is 4yo and it has been quite hard to find anything worthwhile for his screen time (something free at least).

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GCompris: high quality educational software suite for children aged 2 to 10

https://gcompris.net/index-en.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18751739

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=gcompris&sort=byDate&type=comm...

I found you can get a lot of games that used to be good (e.g. Cut the Rope) in ad-free, IAP-free form by using Apple Arcade. Highly recommend for kids to give them a variety of great and challenging games without ads, and satisfy that constant desire for new stuff kids have.

Just throwing a few things out there:

- We have calls with grandparents regularly. My kids will say hi, but then they go play (usually on a screen so they are not too wild while we talk). Myself and my parents would love to have a game (and be willing to pay) where the grandparents and kids can play together on, say a TV, while having the phone/tablet run the video call.

- We had this problem with "low quality" games until we got a Nintendo Switch. Games aren't free/cheap like on phones, and so we have fewer. The kids focus more on a limited set of games and they're not full of ads.

I think this could be quite helpful, even if it wasn't too ambitious. Like, just make web clones of decent learning games, make sure they get published on a single reputable domain, and make it easy for people to contribute.

Like Number Munchers is a fine game. It's not a revolution in education or anything. But it would not be very hard to clone, publish, and make it easier to find and use than an archive.org emulator. Make it data driven and educators might want to contribute new tasks.

One game isn't much but if you put half a dozen together that could be a good start. In my experience kids are not as picky as people expect so long as you treat them decently.

I wrote an online single player strategy game called Trek and released it on GH pages a few days ago. Link is here: https://vivegi.github.io/Trek

It is free and online. No user registrations. No trackers. No 3rd party scripts or dependencies and the entire web app is self-contained. Just HTML/CSS/JS + media assets.

It is based on interactive 3-SAT solving although I deliberately made a point of not mentioning it on the game's home page to keep it appealing to the widest possible audience, not just CompSci/SAT folks.

Would love to hear what you and your 4/yo think of it.

Of course, open to collabs.

I have a 3yo and 2yo. I love the idea of learning through play. I made a simple game for my kids to learn keyboard control, collaboration and counting! The best part is that the characters in the game are their cuddly stuffies. And the setting is based on a story I told my daughter of her penguin named Didi's quest to find coconuts. https://didi-adventure.surge.sh/ Happy to share ideas and collab!

I'm a fan of building games, and a fan of reducing the number of ads people see! I'm an iOS developer, if you could use help from a native iOS dev feel free to reach out at the email in my profile.

I would appreciate your feedback on halfchess.com (though it has ads starting at later stages). You can find my email in about us section in the app or tweet to me @navalsaini .

please see my other comment in this post. I am build an app to teach kid (2-5 years old) to read using a new method based on machine learning.

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