Encouraging people – not just kids, but adults too – to put down the video games and do something productive or educational can feel like a fruitless task. But what about those games that are in themselves educational?
There is a breed of iOS games out there that makes a virtue of being both fun and beneficial in some way. Here are some of the better examples of educational games.
7 Billion Humans [$4.99/£4.99]
Experimental Gameplay Group’s clever little game does nothing less than teach kids (or curious adults, for that matter) the basics of coding, under the guise of a cutely satirical puzzle game. You must use programming principles to train a bunch of office drones to solve basic spatial tasks. With a structure that rewards thinking outside of the box, 7 Billion Humans is a rare game that can genuinely make you smarter.
Crossword Genius [Free]
There are plenty of crossword games on the App Store that could technically be classed as ‘educational games’, but there’s only one game that will teach you how to solve the elusive cryptic crossword. Crossword Genius lets you take pictures of puzzles from newspapers and magazines, then uses AI to analyze them and advise you on how to complete them. The app also comes with its own supply of daily cryptic crosswords, along with the help to solve them.
Chantlings [$2.99/£2.99]
For all you hesitant warblers out there, Chantlings isn’t an app that will teach you to sing so much as it will encourage you to improve through practice. At the very least, it’ll prompt even the most timid of voices to sound out loud and proud. It does so by offering a cast of cute characters who will harmonize with whatever words and sounds you put out there, with an often uncanny level of slickness.
Sticky Terms [Free]
Developer Philipp Stollenmayer knows how to make fun games that play with language, and Sticky Terms is perhaps his purest attempt yet. It sees you physically ripping apart jumbled-up clusters of letters, then reassembling them along basic shape-recognition lines. The pay-off, though, is that you’re actually constructing a colloquial word or term in a foreign language. Few games make language feel as tactile and malleable as Sticky Terms, which in turn helps the words and phrases stick in your memory.
