Good for learning
Games already on the site where the thing you do in the game is the thing a school would call a skill. Free, like everything else here.
There are only a few, and that is deliberate. Most puzzle games, including most of ours, teach you to be good at that puzzle and nothing more. We would rather name the two that hold up than put a learning badge on twenty and hope nobody checks.
What holds up
and exactly what it practises
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WAY OFF Guess the place. Find out how many miles wrong you were. Today's puzzle Daily: WAY OFF, today's puzzle Free play: WAY OFF, unlimited
KS2 and KS3 geography
Practises locating real places from a photograph, and reading distance on a map.
Locational knowledge is named explicitly in the KS2 and KS3 geography programme of study. This is direct practice of that skill, not a claim that it improves geography generally.
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Recipe A cryptogram: every letter's swapped, so crack the code and read the quote. Today's puzzle Daily: Recipe, today's puzzle Free play: Recipe, unlimited
KS2 to A-level computing
Practises breaking a substitution cipher by letter frequency and pattern.
Caesar and Vigenère ciphers are named curriculum content in computing from KS2 through to A-level. The puzzle is the cipher; there is nothing to transfer.
Why so few
The research on this is unusually one-sided. Training on a task reliably makes you better at that task, and reliably does not make you better at anything else. A large trial published in Nature in 2010 found improvement on the trained games and no transfer to general thinking. Around seventy cognitive scientists signed a statement saying the same. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission took a settlement from a brain-training company over advertising that its games improved performance at school and work.
So we only list a game here when there is no transfer step to fail, when the thing on the screen already is the named skill. Finding a place on a map is locational knowledge. Breaking a substitution cipher is the cipher. Neither of those needs a leap of faith.
Everything else in the jar is a good game. That is a different claim, and we make it happily.
What we have left out, and why
- Crumb Hunt: Word searches have evidence against them as a literacy activity and are widely regarded by teachers as busywork. Shipping it under a learning heading would invite a judgement about everything else here from the one title easiest to dismiss.
What is coming
A phonics game where the mechanic is phoneme substitution, changing one sound at a time to climb a ladder of words, is built and waiting on one thing: the sounds have to be recorded by a person. Text-to-speech adds a small extra vowel to a consonant, "buh" instead of "b", which is the exact error phonics teaching is designed to avoid. It will go up when it can be done properly rather than cheaply.
Several other games could carry curriculum content. A matching game over term-and-definition pairs is real retrieval practice, and a crossword over subject vocabulary is real recall. They are matching games and crosswords today, so they are not on this page today.