note: this is a guest post by Larry from our sister site www.crazykidschicago.com

I receive a pretty steady stream of phone calls and emails with new organizations, books, movies, and TV shows that are trying to teach our kids about the environment, ecology, going green, and the issues currently facing our planet. I talked with Victoria Lauren at Blue Vision who developed the site saveplanetblue.com. Victoria’s concept of creating a virtual world where kids can learn about the environmental challenges we face intrigued me so I took a look at it the other day.

Save Planet Blue is a membership site that is currently offering free access to some of its content. Over time, the site will have a subscription model and Victoria is passionate enough about the environment that they will be giving a portion of the proceeds to various environmentally focused charities. One you sign up as a member, you get to create a weebol like avatar that lets you customize the gender, hair color, skin color and the color of your clothes.

Once created, you are propelled into the virtual world where the arrow keys move your avatar around the screen. When passing some locations on the screen, you’ll be prompted with factoids about environmental issues. There are also gates that will take you to different parts of the world. Currently, the Rain Forest is open for free playing.

Within Rain Forest, which comes with jungle like noises in the background like birds and monkeys, there are several games that entertain and teach kids. We played the following games:

• Puzzle game. The Puzzle games comes with various level of difficult but provides you with various numbers of pieces that usually combine to make a rainforest animal.
• Match Game. This concentration like game has you match rainforest insects. My kids was fascinated and disgusted by so many bugs in so many colors and shapes. At the end of the game, factoids regarding insects pop up.
• Recycle It. This game was high action and stress. As garbage flies down a conveyor belt you need to put it in the correct recycling bin (paper, plastic, glass, metal) or risk filling up a landfill. At the end of the game, you are reminded with different facts about how much waste is produced and the impact on the environment.
• Petey’s Repeat. This game brought me back to the days of Simon (that multi-colored sound game from the 70/80’s). Except the noises were various plants and animals from the rain forest. My kid concentrated hard to remember the pattern and giggled when he lost.
• Banana Toss. Definitely our most favorite game was throwing bananas at the monkey. If you hit the monkey it makes a good squash sound and if you throw at a different animal you lose points.

Overall, I think Save Planet Blue has the right idea. Like many of these children’s sites, the graphics are very intense and can put a lot of strain on the computer. I also think the games and the world can be even more educational with more learning opportunities than just at the end of the game. But in general, it did a good job of entertaining a four year old while sneaking in some education about the planet. Look for this site to expand quickly with new features and possibly even expand into TV or on-line videos.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 6th, 2009 at 3:39 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. If you use RSS, you can subscribe to the RSS feed , or if you would rather receive an e-mail, please subscribe to the e-mail in the lower right hand corner of this page. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.