The Insaniquarium "Curriculum"

Mikey and I got started checking out the free games at MSN a couple months ago. Eventually, he wanted to get the $20 version of one of them. I groaned at first, esp. because I didn't much like the game. Feeding fish and shooting aliens. I didn't find it very exciting.

But hey, let's take a chance. Maybe Mikey will love it and not lose interest quickly. The worst that could happen? We're spent $20 on something that isn't used much. Not too big a risk.

I cannot count the hours we have spent playing this game. We play it together, Mikey plays it alone. Caroline (3.5) likes to watch him play. Now Evan (1) gets excited when he hears the music. Michael plays it alone and with Mikey.

I never thought of it as the least bit "educational" but I have been surprised at how much learning has come directly out of this one game.

First of all, you have to keep track of your money so that you can buy pieces of egg to get new pets who help you in various ways. We talk about how much more we need to get before we can afford to buy something, how much 3 egg pieces will cost if each piece is $3000. He's learning how to read numbers into the 10,000s, although it would be easier if they had commas inbetween the 100s and 1000s.

Not just simple math, but veering into economics! If we buy a carnivore it will cost $1000. It will drop diamonds that are worth $200 each. So we'll need to collect 5 diamonds to get our money's worth. Oh, and don't forget that you have to keep buying guppies for the carnivore to eat. Mikey has resisted the urge to buy fish daily in his Virtual Tank so that he can save up to buy a big accessory for his tank. In real life, he's never managed to do that!

I hadn't expected Mikey to learn to spell before he learned to read. Silly me didn't think that was possible! But there he was, creating new users in the game. He asked me how to spell some names and made quite a few on his own by copying words. He ran to his room and got the Spiderman wall sticker to make "Spiderman" a user. He copied the words on the screen and we soon had users called OK, Rename and Cancel.

Mikey's favorite fish are the carnivores. So much so that went we went to the San Antonio zoo, his favorite spot was the piranha tank in the aquarium. He's asked me to find out more about fish, so we've headed to EnchantedLearning.com to read about different kinds of fish and what they like to eat. An episode of "Little Einsteins" showed the Great Lakes with a duckling who needed to go home to Lake Huron. I found a web site about the lakes and we ended up reading more about several kinds of fish that live there. I never knew that some fish eat birds.

You can only choose 3 pets in most of the game, so we've had to balance alien fighting skills against pets with skills that help us collect money more quickly so we can move to the next level.

Some of the pets come with fascinating "facts". They have a home town, some of which we're heard of, have friends in, etc.

Next post will be about all the other fun the game has led to...