Today's highlight is a lovely writeup about The Counting Kingdom on The Artery, NPR's Boston arts website. We had the pleasure of meeting writer Dennis Scimeca at the MassDiGI Game Challenge last month, and he's put together some thoughts on The Counting Kingdom, and what makes it different from other educational games:
“Educational video games often don’t feel like video games at all. They’re just not fun enough. Instead they feel like Trojan horses—educational materials with thin, unsatisfying wisps of a game wrapped around them.
But the game “The Counting Kingdom,” developed by the Boston-based studio Little Worlds Interactive to teach children basic math skills, smoothly avoids this hurdle on the way to becoming an ideal of what a “serious video game” (in the industry lingo) ought to be. Its extremely entertaining game play doesn’t take a back seat to learning, and vice versa.”