Pocket Consoles Are Latest Educational Toys

A new generation of hand-held electronic devices have entered the children’s educational toy and game market.

Apart from Nintendo’s DS and Sony’s PlayStation Portable (PSP), hand-held electronic devices such as mobile phones, MP3 players and readers (characterised by Apple’s iPhone, iPod and iPad ranges) have so far been made for and marketed to adults and teens.

Now a new generation of pocket consoles have been launched specifically for chldren, including Fisher-Price’s iXL Learning System, Leapfrog’s Leapster Explorer and VTech’s MobiGo.

Available in Green or Pink, Leapster features a touch-screen display and built-in stylus, and retails for less than 40.

Aimed at children from toddler and preschool age to nine years old, Leapster features educational games covering subjects from art and music to geography and maths.

Games come in the form of slot-in 64 Megabyte cartridges, but you can also buy and download software ‘apps’ called ‘Leaplets’ from an online shop by connecting the device, with it’s 512Mb internal storage memory, to a PC or Mac computer.

Leaplets come in various forms: e-books to teach vocabulary and spelling, videos to teach counting, language flash cards, and games.

Cartridge games include Mr Pencil Saves Doodleburg, a kind of electronic children’s craft kit game based around drawing, writing letters, numbers and shapes.

Disney Princess: Pop-Up Story Adventure teaches linguistic phonics skills, story comprehension and musical pitch.

The Jewel Train Leaplet teaches logic and reasoning skills by challenging kids to piece together a train set to reach a particular destination.

Older kids will like Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which manages to work geometry and fractions into the action.

Other games include popular franchises Dora the Explorer and Toy Story 3.

MobiGo, which features a full slide-out QWERTY keyboard in addition to a touch-screen display retails for 50. It has a headphone socket for no-noise fun, but be warned – it runs on 4 AA batteries, so invest in rechargables if you don’t want to spend a fortune.

Game cartridges go for 17 and the device can hold up to four downloadable educational mini-games, most of which you must pay for.

Cartridge titles include Dora the Explorer, Toy Story 3 and Mr Men and Little Miss, but the console comes with the six-game Touch & Learn Game Pack.

Touch and Learn includes Wild Fun, where kids must choose the odd one out from a set of animals displayed on the screen.

In Space Challenge, players tap on spaceships to complete number sequences and addition problems.

Shooting Gallery uses the keyboard to type letters matching those on cardboard duck targets.

Ice Escape is a logical children’s puzzle game where the player moves ice blocks to make a bridge for a little penguin.

In Fantastic Forest, kids help a squirrel leap from tree to tree by drawing lines and geometric shapes on the screen, while in Music Maestro players improvise music by tapping on the screen.

Tags:

A Large Selection of Promethean Interactive Whiteboards at Educational AV

If your school requires electronic teaching aids, buy from Educational AV, UK’s premier online store for all kinds of educational equipment. Once you place the order, the company will try to deliver it as early as possible. Generally, all deliveries are made the next day; however, if you require an urgent delivery, there are premium services available for which you have to pay an additional charge. You can check with customer service to find out the scheduled arrival time.

Interactive Whiteboards

For finding Interactive White Boards online, login to http://www.educationalav.ltd.uk/. A number of superior brands of Whiteboards are available at this online store. Some of them include Promethean, Panasonic, Ebeam, Sahara Clever, Bi-Bright, Hitachi, Genee, Acer, Samsung and Mimio. The Promethean ActivBoard is a popular brand with several features. It combines colour, interactivity and motion incorporated with superior sound. With such sophisticated equipment, you can make your teaching a true interactive experience. The display system is excellent with its sensitive pen-touch facility. Learning becomes fun and both students and teachers will enjoy the experience. The product flawlessly integrates content and solutions; the teacher is provided with resourceful teaching materials such as sounds, math tools, templates and applications on gestures. Today’s learners will have an engaging experience; hence, learning becomes exciting.

Tags:

Educational Toys For Children – Learning and Playing Makes the Lesson Last Longer

With educational toys for children, there is more for them than the obvious benefits. All parents want their children to learn as much as they can as soon as possible, but there are limits.

Nearly every toy a toddler will play with has educational value to it. They have to learn how to grasp and hold objects, along with controlling their muscles for simple tasks like stacking blocks.

Puzzles are a great toy to introduce at this very young age. This is where they will begin to recognize the different characters in the puzzles. There are animals, plants, numbers, letters, and symbols they can begin to notice and identify.

The grasping by a toddler is one of the first lessons they will learn. Most adults forget that at that age, a child is still not used to knowing they have arms, fingers, hands, and legs. Coordinating them is a major undertaking for them. When a parent sees a child smile when they finally accomplish one of these simple tasks, a reward of a big hug will do wonders and it instills self-confidence in your child.

As a child grows, more complicated tasks are incorporated into their toys. Many fathers are unaware that playing with dolls for girls will help them in their future. They will not only learn about color coordination and styles of clothing that are appropriate but will also learn the quality of nurturing.

Computers are all the rage with the youth of today. Even these have educational value. Though combat games expose kids to violence, there are still positive things children can learn from them with the proper guidance from parents. Some of these games that also require the players to feed the people and obtain resources help to teach how communities grow and function in the real world. Of course, they also get to destroy the enemy, but that is another story.

The educational toys for children that are available today can help your child learn more and faster than at any time in the history of mankind.

Tags: