MIQ

12th Jun 2011

MIQ, a good educational game for kids, mostly IQ related sets. You can find these in most Popular book stores. In my visit to the Australia-Malaysia Gifted Education Forum 2011 recently, there was a demo for participants to try out themselves the UKM1 test, which is the first screening test for entrance into the PERMATAPintar programme. I took the test myself and one set of the questions are quite similar to the logic in MIQ, not 100% similar, but close. They were primarily the pattern identification and matching ones.

One advice though, get one or two sets if you are interested as usually the sales person will try to convince you to buy a few sets, and they are not cheap.

More details on similar product:

http://www.brainet.com.my/new%20WEB%20concept/AMIQ/AMIQ-intro_eng.html

Homestar Portable

25th May 2011

Homestar Portable is a great educational application available on the PSP platform. It is actually not a game but a planetarium application which supports the use of star chart to view and study the night sky on a particular day and time. Although the default location is set to Tokyo, Japan, one can set the location to others in the list including KL, Malaysia.

Personally, I find Homestar Portable being really a great application, as it also comes with short educational videos on various stargazing topics including learning the night sky of the four seasons (spring, summer, autumn, and winter sky), solar eclipse, meteor shower, summer triangle, solar system and etc. One can view these short videos again and again and eventually become familiar with the night sky. These videos are my favorites and also my kids’ favorites. I am beginning to learn about the night sky and various constellations by season using a technique named star hopping guided and shown in the videos.

Nonetheless, the application is in Japanese but there is also a translated version in Mandarin. Hence, you will only be able to enjoy this application if you can understand Mandarin using the translated version. I do hope the creator will eventually release the English version as this application is one of the best of the best.

http://kotaku.com/#!190756/homestar-psp-yeah-its-full-of-stars

http://homestar.sega.jp/

Monopoly

21st Jan 2011

My son recently asked me why do people buy property. He thought they will have less money after buying property. I figure out to introduce Monopoly game to the kids to help them understand property investment.

We got a Malaysia edition Monopoly set and started playing with the kids. They soon understand the advantages of property investment when they notice a player have to pay rent to another player when he/she trespass the other player’s property and so forth.

The Malaysia edition comes with familiar landmarks and residential neighborhoods e.g. Bandar Utama, Bangsar, Cyberjaya, Putrajaya, Petronas Twin Towers, Menara Kuala Lumpur and etc. which the kids are already familiar with.

As we are busy parents, we also got a PC and PSP version for the kids. Both versions are highly interactive and fun playing, see attached photos and tube. The kids really have fun enjoy playing Monopoly.

Monopoly PC edition’s tube :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAPwgwoHPuc

16th Apr 2011 – Updated

On 15th Apr 2011, my son suddenly had a thought to play his monopoly game using his toddler’s ABC play pads to create the game board instead.

10th Jun 2011 – Updated

Recently, my son has started playing the card version of monopoly, Monopoly Deal. It seems quite fun to play as well.

12th Jun 2011 – Updated

Today I surrendered to the kids again, they got me to buy the Monopoly City version. This version is not cheap. One advice, compare the price before buying, as we found MPH retails for MYR170 while we got it for MYR140 from Parkson, with additional 10% discount during sales.