Buzz Jungle Party for Nursery & Early Years

I have been having a look at Buzz Jungle Party recently, particulalry in view of how it might be able to play a role in Nursery and early Years settings. This game is associated with the successful Buzz stable from Relentless software although it was developed by Magenta Software.

It is a well crafted social game that has players competing in a fast moving quiz via a simplified handset that has one big red button and four smaller coloured buttons. Although there are 40 mini-games within this application you don't need to play them all...you can select and customise games to suit the particular needs of the children you are working with and the concepts/strategies you wish to be working on.

I spent two Friday evenings recently playing all the games in Buzz Jungle Party with the express intention of identifying the games that may or may not be of use in the pre-school/Early Years setting. You can download the my report below:

Download buzzjungleparty.doc

There are a number of games that practitioners may feel are unsuitable for Early Years children in terms of the slapstick violence that is contained within some of these games. I have attempted to highlight these by colour coding each activity.

Green      no problems
Orange    issues of concern
Red         real issues of concern

The arguments surrounding this issue are complex and in many cases down to individual judgement but I felt that it was better to make practitioners aware of the ‘slapstick violent’ aspect of some of the games. Please do not focus on this though as this is a super piece of software that is so engaging, enjoyable and challenging for children… and adults too!

Good luck with it.

Comments

[Kim Pericles]

Thanks for this Derek, it will be really useful to pick up and run with a particular game that suits now that you've done the "hard" work of playing them all! ;)

Just a quick question - how easy is it to play the same game over and over again? Do you have to keep going through a main menu (which is time consuming and a bit frustrating!).

[Derek]

It's not that easy Kim. What you can do is make a custom game but select the same game 5 times. Try this to see if it works.

[Margaret Cassidy]

Thanks for this Derek. We are just about to give this to a school and I was going to go through the games over the holidays - you have saved me having to do this - or maybe I really wanted an excuse to play all the game!! I did have reservations about some of the games, but one of the objectives of giving it out to a school was to have older children evaluate the games too, to see if they thought them suitable for younger children.

[Kim Pericles]

Thanks, will give it a go :)