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!”