ItzaBitza: Home Sweet Home Demo

Educational games aim to help the children learn basic skills by having some fun at the same time, although some are more entertaining than others. Creativity is certainly an important building block in a child’s upbringing, since it encourages the little one to come up with new and original ideas when it comes to solving problems and dealing with the outside world.

ItzaBitza: Home Sweet Home makes learning way more fun, by encouraging the kids to draw the desired objects inside the game in order to advance through the various levels. Hence, not only do they learn how to accomplish simple tasks, but they also get to practice their artistic skills at the same time and get to use the computer in order to express themselves.

Two funny and helpful characters join the children along the way and they are also the ones responsible for providing the players with the tasks. In the beginning, they just want to populate the rather bleak world and give it some soul, by adding a shining sun, a house and various other such objects, which need to be drawn by hand in order to come as close to the real thing as possible.

Since not many children are able to make proper use of a computer under any circumstances, the game uses a very intuitive interface to help them figure out how to use the mouse to draw the shapes. Thus, before each task, a simple ‘how-to’ presentation is shown, detailing the basic concepts and displaying an example concerning the objective at hand.

Moreover, the graphics themselves are very colorful and well-made, in the sense that they are not pixelated and they look quite nice. The hand-made drawings can be a bit sloppy on the other hand, mostly because the drawing tool aims to simulate the wax crayons one might use in kindergarten. Obviously, this should not pose any problems, especially since it is much easier to transpose the skill into real life this way.

In the end, ItzaBitza: Home Sweet Home may not teach children maths, or how to read, but creativity is a skill that’s just as important. Hence, children that display curious amounts of creativity should be encouraged to pursue their passion, whether it’s drawing, writing, or any other kind of art.