How many Chinese tuition centres do you know, that uses gaming to engage students in their learning? Well, for years, KidStartNow (熊猫博士语文学堂）has used gamification in their lessons to encourage students to answer questions, awarding ‘coins’ (tabulated in a class leaderboard) that could be traded for small rewards.
This time, they have taken things one step further about 8 months ago, by introducing Pet Battle, a cute game where the child’s Pet gets to launch an ‘attack’ on a computerised opponent if he or she answers the Chinese exercise question correctly.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is embedded in this game, as the more the child engages in the Pets Battle, the better the AI engine understands his or her strengths and weaknesses, and follows-up by customising a learning plan.
10 year old B has been enjoying this, and recently, this was enhanced from just the Fire Realm to an activated Water Realm! B had been asking and asking when the Water Realm would be ‘live’. (p.s. The game shows that there’s another Nature Realm to look forward to as well!)
And a new Pet MangSha the Shark has been added too! In addition to FlameBun the Bunny, Rakoon the Raccoon, and BurnOx the, well, Ox.
The portal encourages regular learning by having Daily Sign-In rewards.
Ta-dah! This is how the new Water Realm looks. B commented that the new interface was a lot faster and smoother than before.
Here’s a sample of a question – hover over the answers to highlight it, and click to lock it in!
There are also two types of ‘assault missiles’ that you can fire, tailored to each pet.
Here’s a video to show how it works!
You can use Water Pets in the Fire Realm and vice versa.
Here’s another video showing the cute effects of battle.
And one where two sharks duke it out.
At the end, there’s a ranking leaderboard, to add in that extra competitive element. It’s been effective in spurring B on to do more exercises, so as to inch her way up higher! Heh.
If you’re worried this might be yet another screen activity that gets too addictive, have no fear. There is a limit programmed in to how many realm battles a kid can do per day – from experience, that should add up to about half an hour.
Daily Challenges
As KidStartNow has always been geared towards having online resources, their personalised portal also contains other helpful features.
The Daily Challenge was the original feature that also incentivises revision by awarding coins and diamonds. Log in daily to do enough exercises to get all the stars completed, and get ‘an apple a day’.
This is currently geared towards overall revision, so the child just clicks to hear the words read out, and chooses the correct one to get coins and eventually diamonds.
Diamonds can be accumulated and exchanged for little gifts! So far B has redeemed the “Transformable Remote Toy Car” and has carted the “Hungry Hippo Board Game”.
There’s similarly a coin leaderboard for the class, and even a level-wide ranking for kids to get that extra motivation to race on.
Completing the Daily Challenge also rewards you with Pets (separate from the Pet Battle game)!
B has many many pets from Daily Challenges, haha. Most of whom she’s merged to monstrous sizes.
Video Lessons
Apart from all that, there are also video lessons available to bolster learning alongside class lessons. The platform is holistic in containing lesson materials that you can download, as well as in-class worksheets that you can print. Very helpful, especially in this season of Covid-19, when classes had to be abruptly shifted online more than once.
I really appreciated having an online option readily available, and have shifted B onto it since mid-May. We find the teaching and learning effective enough, and are likely to stay on the online platform for the foreseeable future.
For younger kids, they also have a cute range of videos, which were very helpful when the kids were younger.
So if you’re looking for a Chinese tuition centre that is fun and has extra elements to engage your child in learning the language, do check out KidStartNow! You can WhatsApp them at 9820 7272 with enquiries (replies are prompt), or register for a free trial by signing up on their website’s online form.
You can follow KidStartNow on Facebook too, to keep updated on their latest news!
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