JumpStart’s Virtual World Teaches Kids While They’re Busy Having Fun

When it comes to educational software, the trick is to make kids think they’re just playing a traditional escapist game, while they’re really being surreptitiously fed facts and logic problems that put their brains to work. But while many games have done this for years, the technique hasn’t really made the jump to online virtual worlds - most of the kid-friendly virtual worlds are more focused on socializing and having fun than learning. Now JumpStart, a best-selling educational software developer, is looking to fill this niche with its new JumpStart Virtual World, which launched this week in public beta.

Read the entire article TechCrunch, December 2008

“A series of three products [JumpStart World] for kindergartners, first graders and second graders is brilliantly melding the gaming world and education.” 

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“The ride-height requirement on virtual worlds is about to move down a few inches. Knowledge Adventure, the maker of kids' educational game software JumpStart, plans Monday to begin selling virtual world software for 3- to 5-year-olds. The software, called JumpStart Advanced Preschool World, will encourage kids to learn their ABCs by playing games in a 3D version of the beach or a jungle, with heavy use of voice and images instead of text. And it will give young ones their first taste of creating and decorating an avatar.”

CNET News.com, May 2008

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“To qualify as a primo piece of educational software, a title should offer many and varied academic activities, plenty of play-oriented pursuits, incentives to spur and reward achievement and all the interactive trimmings — cool characters, great 3-D graphics and snappy sound effects. JumpStart World Kindergarten aces all those tests and do the extra-credit assignment as well: addressing the been-there/done-that problem that plagues parents' pocketbooks.”

Houston Chronicle, July 2007

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“A new form of edutainment software has arrived in the form of JumpStart World, an educational theme park for Windows computers that can replenish itself with new content.”

NY Times, April 2007

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