Children don’t have the kind of maturity level, ability to comprehend, let alone, the attention span to appreciate these forms of media and garner any type of useful knowledge. That’s where their website, Meet The Minimops comes into the picture. National Geographic has found a way to engage the young child demographic: By creating a website that consists of a medley of interactive, stimulating, and challenging online games for children to play and learn with.

Meet The Minimops features 5 unique games: A connect the dot game that features various animals or artifacts of scientific or historic nature, a music band game that lets you control each of the band members and even record a song, a game that lets you convert visual effects into music, a garden planting game where the object of the game is to figure out how to make a plant grow, and a dinosaur puzzle game.

Each of the interactive games part of the Meet The Minimops ensemble caters to the themes that are typical of National Geographic. Each one offers the game playing child an opportunity to learn, develop their motor skills, develop their analytical and problem solving skills, and to stimulate his or her creativity.

Online Tangram Games And More is a website that offers a myriad of problem-solving puzzle games for children to play. There are a total of nineteen games currently offered through this website, as of this writing, as a matter of fact: Mahjongg Solitaire, Reversi, Same Game, Backgammon, Sudoku, Mastermind 2, Tangram, Snake, Pairs, Maverick, Gravity, Rush Hour, Tris, Difference, Tower of Hanoi, Set, Mastermind, Eleven High, and Game of Life.

Each of these games, in some fashion, call upon the player to rely upon reasoning, logic, and analytical skills in order to win each game.

Most, if not all of these online games, are based on their traditional offline counterparts. What is unique about the ability to play these games online is that the player has the ability to play against the computer and does not need to worry about setting up an actual physical game board. The player can simply log onto the website and get started playing right away without having to set up any tangible game pieces. Hence there is no clean up.

Plus, the games may be played an unlimited number of times, over and over again, with different variations of each game during each and every single invocation of the game instances.

Today’s youngsters can challenge themselves and test their knowledge of geography right online. Learn Geography is an online geography website that empowers youngsters to master their knowledge and awareness of the world.

The way purposegames.com works is that when you first land at the website, you are presented with a series of different geography challenges. Each challenge varies in the degree of its complexity. Some challenges are very simple, for example, naming the seven continents. And then there are challenges for naming each of the states of the United States, the countries in various continents throughout the world, the capital cities of states, the capital cities of countries. And then there are even more complex challenges for advanced students of geography, such as games that teach you to associate longitudes and latitudes with various nations, localities within various different countries, state abbreviations, identifying what countries lie in between two others, identifying countries ranked by population, identifying the distances between various countries, countries ranked by size, and countless more.

In fact, there are well over thirteen thousand games in total, on this website! That is enough to challenge even the most knowledgeable person about geography.

While this website is designed with children as the target demographic, it is without a doubt, something that even adults can enjoy. Many of these games are all timed quizzes. In other words, you can challenge yourself to see how quickly you can solve each geography quiz. See if you can best your own previous score. Or better yet, pit yourself against your friends or your colleagues to see who can complete a quiz in the fastest amount of time. When you complete a game, you can submit your score online to the quiz’s online leader board, where you can see the top scoring people for this particular competition. Do you have what it takes to make it to the leader board?

A great way to bring the world of encyclopedic knowledge to a child would be to develop a fun, interactive encyclopedia for kids, online. One thing is true about many children, and that is that they are visual and auditory learners. They can create associations between ideas and concepts by seeing, by listening, and by doing, and not necessarily by merely just reading. That is where Encyclopedia Interactica comes into the picture.

The Encyclopedia Interactica is a unique type of online encyclopedia geared specifically toward young children. What makes this online children’s encyclopedia so unique is that there are absolutely no words involved whatsoever! The entire website is based on clickable, interactive pictoral modules. For example, if you want to learn about the solar system, you will see an animated diagram of the solar system, showing the planets revolving around the sun. You also have the ability to click on buttons and sliders on the website to interact with each module, so that you can learn more about each topic, interactively.

The premise of Mini-Mizer is really quite simple: You start with a basic Lego figure. And then your child can customize this figure across a myriad of different dimensions: Your child can customize the avatar’s facial expression, hair style and hair color, color and style of shirt and pants, and what type of hat, scarf, and shoes it is wearing, and even whether the character has wings or a tail!

This game encourages youngsters to explore all of the different ways people in the real world look and how they dress. It empowers them to take creative control over creating their own characters, using completely interchangeable parts. For instance, with the simple click of a mouse button, the avatar might switch from brown hair to blond hair, or from wearing blue jeans to a red skirt. Youngsters can even pick different objects for the avatar to hold in its hand, and you even get to pick which hand the object is being held in.

Games like this one not only challenge your child’s creative intellect, but also encourage the development of your child’s hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills, namely that of being able to manipulate the information on the screen by moving the mouse around and clicking on the mouse buttons.

Has your child created a masterpiece that you would simply like to save, or which you would like to use elsewhere online? The Mini-Mizer website even provides instructions on how you can save the avatar that your child has customized.

With hundreds of possible combinations of characteristics to build your avatar from, this will help to stimulate your child’s sense of curiosity and creativity.

Try Pick Chow! It’s an online interactive game that lets kids create their own plate of food by dragging and dropping food from different foods groups onto a plate, that itself happens to be divided up into 5 different sections, one for each food group.

The object of the game is to fill up your plate with the right combination of foods so that you end up with what is known as a “5 star meal” – or a meal that is well-balanced and healthy, consisting of the right food choices from the “meat and beans” group, the “dairy” group, the “fruit” group, the “vegetable” group, the “grains and starchy veggies” group, and dessert.

A series of meters move up and down, between a red zone (unhealthy) and a green zone (healthy), that represent the quantity of proteins, carbohydrates, fats, fiber, sugar, saturated fat, and sodium on your plate, relative to the recommended portion size for that meal. Your goal is to make sure that each of these meters stays in the green at all times.

This game helps the child put each meal into perspective, by being able to visualize how their plate might actually look if the selected foods were chosen to fill the plate. You even have the option to click on foods and see all of the nutrition information for each, as well as a quick fun fact about the food.

What is fascinating about this game is that while it is aimed at children, even diet-conscious adults, particularly those who are trying to eat healthy and lose weight, can greatly benefit from this tool. If you are planning a healthy meal for yourself but aren’t sure what to eat, you can create a mock-up of your actual meal and gauge for yourself whether you are able to keep each of the meters in the green.

If you are able to successfully create a “5-star meal”, then you are a winner!

From the website: “Once upon a time this was a holiday-ish site created by a rather big-ish ad agency to help raise money for UNICEF. Well, we more than hit our goal of $10 000 and wanted to say thanks by turning the site over to the people”.

A beautiful winter snowflake created at flurrious.com

Play Math Lines on minimalistarcade.com, a banner free arcade.

Math Lines – a math game where you shoot colored marbles.

The site is completely ad-free. The C and Java source code is available for download, and you can publish the games on your own website if you want to.
Playing a logic puzzle game called Cube on http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/.

There are versions for German Bundesländer, Africa, Brazil, China, European countries France,  Italian regions, Japan, Netherlands and the UK as well.

Statetris is available both online as a Flash game, and as an application for the iPhone.

Seterra is very easy to use, and quite addicting! It is used and loved by kids and grown-ups all over the world. It has been translated into many languages, including French, German, Italian and Spanish.

Seterra can be downloaded from http://www.seterra.net.

Practising the states in the south and northeast.

Learning the countries of Europe

A Youtube video of a guy finding all the countries in Africa in 47 seconds

In the Poisson Rouge shop, you can support this great site by buying T-shirts, or purchasing the downloadable versions of the games  for Windows or Mac OS X.

The main menu of the Poisson Rouge website. The little castles with flags on them lead to the French, English and Chinese language schools for kids.

Jacksonpollock.org was created in Adobe Flash by Milos Manetas.  It is also available for the iPhone.

Fun doodles at jacksonpollock.org.

The games are accompanied by soothing classical music, making them a relaxing kind of time wasters.

Playing the monkeyslide game at Orisinal.com

A jumping rabbit in the Winterbells game at Orisinal.com: Morning Sunshine.

On Starfall.com you will meet a number of cute animated characters such as Zac The Rat, Peg The Hen or Gus The Duck. They will guide you through the many activities, including Sight Words and exercises where you learn all about chunking or long vowels vs short vowels.

The animated alphabet has a cute animation or song for each letter in the alphabet.

For kids who already know how to read, Starfall.com offers online animated plays, fiction an nonfiction stories, comics, folk tales, Creek myths and Chinese fables. You can click on each word in the texts and have it read out loud, or listen to it one sentence at a time.

In the Starfall Store , you can order a number of great products such as Starfall Speedway Game, a literacy bord game, Phonics puzzles, motivational stickers and much more.

With its huge selection of great activities, Starfall.com is the number one literacy website on the Internet. Best, of all, it is completely free and does not display any ads!

The collection of minigames feature a jumping dog, people jumping on armchairs, a man picking apples and more.

A simple point-and-click game at Boobah.com.

Boobah armchair game

Tux Paint is free, open source software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Tuxpaint is sponsored by the Tux For Kids project.

Paining a hen in Tuxpaint.

The members that color the most pages will be displayed on the site’s Top Members list, and the finished paintings can be saved to a personal gallery.

Fish coloring sheet at the thecolor.com website.