An Educational Card Game?

My daughter got this game a while back, I think for her birthday, but that should show you exactly how well used this game has been to this point.  It's largely been forgotten in all the moves we've had over the past year.  We decided on New Year's Eve to break them out and give them a try.  I gave the directions a read through, and since my daughter still swears she can't read, decided I would read the trivia cards and she would get to answer the questions.  Her goal was to get all the cards in the end.  It turned out to be educational, informative, and a lot of fun!  I can only imagine how fun this game could be with several players.

So what was this game that was so great for my family?  There were actually two games, Professor Noggin's Earth Science card game and Professor Noggin's Outer Space card game.  The game is fairly simple to play.  There's a six sided die with each game, though it only uses numbers one through three.  The cards all have pictures on them with the name of the subject the questions will be on, such as stars, Saturn V Rocket, astronauts, comets, etc for the Outer Space version and rain, continental drift, rain forest, etc for the Earth Science version.  There are two levels of play on each card with three questions in each level.  If you answer the trivia question right, you get the card.  If you answer it wrong, the correct answer is read aloud and the card goes to the bottom of the pile, recycled back into play.  Each player rolls the die and is given the corresponding question on the card, 1-3.  You can choose the harder or easier level for knowledge, or mix the levels to allow those who are more knowledgeable to play with those who are less so, like parents getting the harder questions and children getting the easier ones.

I have to admit, I expected my daughter to do a lot better on both trivia sets than she did.  In part, it was late and we were both tired, but I was also surprised at how hard some of the easy questions were!  Well, it's not so much that they were hard as some of them were answers I didn't even know, like the Russians being the first country to have a manned space expedition, or that the first creature to orbit earth was a dog.  In some cases, these were things I feel I should have known, but must have forgotten somewhere along the line.  I didn't take a look at the harder trivia questions, but I'd be curious to know.

While I do think the subjects were great as stand-alone games, I did think about how fun it would be to play a mixed category kind of game with cards from each of the subjects they offer (and there's a lot of subjects!) to create some larger game, though working through all the questions would surely take forever.  I do think the idea of having mixed genres for information would be a lot of fun.  It would also take slower to cycle through the cards.  Once the child knows the information fairly well and the trivia starts to become easy, you can then go on to the harder questions, or you could add it to the list of those to use for mixed trivia to keep the brain sharp, jumping from subject to subject, something I always enjoyed as a child.  I have to admit, collecting all the sets could become quite pricey, but if you use them regularly, it would be a good investment.  It's also yet another fun game that can be played as a family.  While the younger ones may not be ready to tackle the harder questions, by listening in as the parents try to answer the questions, or have the right answer read to them, they'll start to pick up on the answers themselves!  It's a great learning tool that the whole family can be in on (and learn something from!) which is also excellent!

My family does best with learning in a fun and engaging way, such as playing games.  Because of that, games such as these are perfect!  They take subjects like science out of books and turn them into something really fun and interactive.  Unlike science experiments, these games allow the family to work with trivia that can open up the curiosity to expand deeper into the subject or not as the child chooses.  Science experiments are also wonderful, but take time, resources, and typically a lot of clean-up!  The card game can be opened up and started in less than a minute and goes away in slightly longer than that!

I love these games.  I'm really looking forward to being able to make the investment on more in the future.  We haven't been working on them long, but this has been a great way to learn some new, fun facts for my daughter!  Who knows?  It may start with these card games, then end up with a love for something even more challenging, like Trivial Pursuit!