I haven’t had a chance to try this yet, but my new gam­ing friend in Hawaii Amy sent me a link to Arca­d­e­mic Skill Builders, a site full of free edu­ca­tional games for younger kids. They’re done in Flash so that you can play them with your mouse or key­board, but some of them a’re also designed to be played on the Wii in its web browser, which is just too cool. Lit­er­ally get kids involved in the game — wonderful.

About Arca­d­e­mic Skill Builders

“Arca­d­e­mic Skill Builders are online edu­ca­tional games that offer a pow­er­ful approach to learn­ing basic math, lan­guage arts, vocab­u­lary, and think­ing skills. This pro­gram stems from expe­ri­ence, sys­tem­atic obser­va­tions, and research in attempt­ing to under­stand stu­dent learn­ing in school and social situations.

The soft­ware was inspired by arcade games and the intense engage­ment they fos­tered between the game and player. We rea­soned if this kind of engage­ment could be focused on edu­ca­tional con­tent, it would be truly a mag­i­cal approach to cer­tain kinds of learning.

Philo­soph­i­cally, the games embrace research on learn­ing deal­ing with ‘auto­matic­ity’ and ‘flu­ency.’ Auto­matic­ity is fast and accu­rate object iden­ti­fi­ca­tion at the sin­gle object level. Flu­ency involves a deeper under­stand­ing, and antic­i­pa­tion of what will come next.

Flu­ency impacts three types of crit­i­cal learn­ing outcomes:

• Reten­tion: the abil­ity to per­form a skill or recall knowl­edge long after for­mal learn­ing pro­grams have ended
• Endurance: the abil­ity to main­tain per­for­mance levels
• Appli­ca­tion: the abil­ity to apply what is learned to per­form more com­plex skills in new situations.

These engag­ing edu­ca­tional games pro­vide focused rep­e­ti­tion prac­tice that enables flu­ency to be achieved more quickly. With what we now know about auto­matic­ity and flu­ency in aca­d­e­mic per­for­mance, we can help stu­dents achieve mas­ter­ful lev­els per­for­mance faster than ever before! View our man­ual for more on our philosophy.

Our edu­ca­tional video games offer an inno­v­a­tive approach to teach­ing basic aca­d­e­mic skills by incor­po­rat­ing fea­tures of arcade games and edu­ca­tional prac­tices into fun online games that will moti­vate, intrigue, and teach your students.”

In the future, they’ll be adding “fea­tures that will enable you to save records, tai­lor con­tent, track scores, pin­point stu­dent prob­lem areas, and much more!”