Abacus Project: School Edition

Learning can be fun in some circumstances if the subject you are trying to understand holds any kind of interest to you, but if it’s not a particularly attractive matter, things get a tad more complicated. However, even when that happens to be the case, there are still methods to make things easier and find some kind of pleasure in the subject you are trying to study.

Abacus Project: School Edition aims to combine the joy and freedom of playing video games with the boredom that’s usually associated with mathematics and various logical problems. By doing so, children enjoying the game can learn useful things at the same time, while also developing their logical thinking and making use of various mathematical operations.

There are multiple modes to choose from, depending on what skills you want to emphasize on. As such, the arcade mode is actually a 2D platformer in which the players control a young student trying to deal with some kind of natural disaster, while solving the puzzles he comes across. Flashcards and simple standalone puzzle modes are available too, which focus more on the learning part.

Although they might not pose so many problems to the younger audience, the application has a few flaws one might notice. In essence, the platformer levels are extremely repetitive, because the only thing that seems to change most of the time are the puzzles themselves, while the location and the general level layout stay the same. This might have the undesired effect of boring the children a tad too quickly.

However, the rest of the challenges are pretty ingenious and fun to participate in, regardless of whether you have to mix colors to obtain a complementary one or just perform some basic additions. Not only that, but the graphics quality is decent in most cases, especially in the case of the arcade play mode, even if the engine is 2D and it may look a bit faded in some cases.

When it’s all said and done, Abacus Project: School Edition may not be perfect, but it does manage to obtain some decent results from the bold mixture of video games and maths. Hence, it can prove to be a valuable tool in every parent’s arsenal.