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Comment by sersi | Hacker News Reader

It's a neat project and great that it's opensource. I'm not an expert though but when I compare this to Educational apps from my childhood like Adibou or Castle of Dr Brain, it seems the activities are not as fun with the exception of Scratch (but that's external).

I'm actually curious if there's research on how learning is impacting by the presentation of the material and how fun the activities are. Naively, I'd think those old educational software I've seen worked better because by being fun, they encouraged the child to try and solve puzzles, do activities longer.

I have a child who is soon going to be 3 and I'd like to let him play some educational software 30 minutes a week or so so I'm actually actively interested in figuring what is something that's good, fun and has the most positive impact. So if anyone has some relevant studies etc... I'm all ears

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I don't have studies but we found that "teach your monster to read" was great and enjoyed. It's UK focussed, about learning to read phonetics. It's essentially a series of mini-games tying a story together, and it was very engaging for my son at a similar age.

Also it's a one off purchase. (Edit - on android, free online it seems)

If that's not as relevant for you where you are, it might give some jumping off points for finding more like it

https://www.teachyourmonster.org/teachyourmonstertoread

Siblings and I were given Castle of Doctor Brain at too young an age to make much progress. It took a long time for us to figure out the puzzle on the door to get into the castle, but it must have had some strong appeal for us to keep coming back. We got stuck plenty of times after that too.!

Looked it up for nostalgia and found we must have been inadvertently been playing on a harder difficulty. Feel somewhat vindicated. https://strategywiki.org/wiki/The_Castle_of_Dr._Brain/Outsid...

GCompris is a fantastic bit of open source educational software: https://www.gcompris.net/index-en.html

> the activities are not as fun with the exception of Scratch (but that's external).

Sugar has the TurtleArt activity, which is very much like Scratch but with the LOGO turtle: https://help.sugarlabs.org/en/turtleart.html

My 4+ year-old doesn't seem to mind the amount of fun in these activities; the rather boring-looking Maze activity is a current favorite. That said, I do think that many of the activities in the catalogue have a user interface that I find alienating or somewhat ugly.

I loved LOGO as a kid, my father was a teacher and he had a robotic LOGO turtle mounted with a pen that could be used to trace on A3 paper. Lot's of fun but that was more around 6 years old or so.

PBS Kids has a lot of games and activities on their website:

https://pbskids.org/games

If your kids watch any PBS shows them they'll recognize the characters.

The activities were fun enough for our twins to learn how to use computer mice at age 3.

Tux Paint is also really fun for young kids and a good way to learn mouse usage:

https://tuxpaint.org/

Thanks for the Tux Paint suggestion, I played a lot with Kid Pix as a kid and it seems that Tux Paint is similar :)

Haven't looked at the PBS shows yet, right now our son has been rather obsessed in a BBC show called Maddie do you know? because it explains how things works and he's excited to see train tracks, helicopters etc... He also really liked Mickey Clubhouse which has the advantage of being translated in Cantonese (my wife's language).

I don't know about studies, but as a parent of a slightly older kid, it's 90s edutainment all the way. Zoombinis, PJ Sam, Crystal Rainforest...

Nice, I love Humongous so knew about PJ Sam (and plan to play Putt Putt together with him) but didn't know Zoombinis and Crystal Rainforest. Any other recommendations?

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