This week, travel to a magical village and stop a book-eating goblin and collect over seventy books in Teach Monster: Reading for Fun. Plus travel back in time along the coast of Italy and Greece in Blue Borders.
Teach Monster: Reading for Fun
By Teach Your Monster Ltd.
Reading for Fun is a very polished game about helping a village full of colorful characters, and of course, reading. Kids create a monster that moves into the village and interacts with the other characters there, delivering parcels, following recipes, checking the noticeboard, and collecting books. Every activity is designed to encourage reading to decipher what they need to do, or to enjoy the books, although kids can tap on text to have it spoken to them. Kids get to see their bookshelf fill with illustrated books as they complete tasks, and the game prompts them to read books as part of the overall story. There are also costumes to try on, games to play, recipes to cook, and an over-arching quest to deal with a book-eating goblin. Reading for Fun very successfully builds reading into an interesting story game with impressive depth. Free for a limited time.
Blue Borders
By Applicazioni di ingegneria ed informatica
Blue Borders is a story about the history of Taranto and Corfu, ports along the Mediterranean
Sea. Through beautiful drawings and animations, it talks about the people, their relationship with the sea over the centuries, and their activities such as fishing, but also the production of much sought after purple dyes. Along with the story are some slightly clunky simple quiz games, and much more detailed information (at an elementary school level) and historical images about the subjects covered. The text is available in Italian and English, although strangely narration is not available in English. Blue Borders is an interesting app with some rough edges, but covering a subject I haven’t seen before in an app.
