Aliens is an educational software where players must hit the “slimy goo” (aliens) that appear and disappear into the craters of a planet. The more aliens are hit, the faster they pop out, increasing the challenge. The game also features a “friendly” character, the Astronaut, who must not be hit and awards coins to increase the player’s score.
This is a single-player game. On the home screen, at the bottom, there is a menu button with instructions on how to play and credits for the game developers. The scoreboard button allows the player to see their current ranking.
Players can choose between three difficulty levels: easy, medium, or hard. In the easy level, there are five colours used: red, yellow, blue, black, and white. Red, yellow, and blue each have their own button. Black appears when no button is pressed, and white when all three are pressed at the same time.
In the medium and hard modes, in addition to the four base colours, three new ones are introduced: orange, purple, and green. These new colours are created by pressing two or three buttons simultaneously:
• Orange = red + yellow
• Green = yellow + blue
• Purple = red + blue.
At the start of each level, the curtains open and a race begins.At the bottom of the screen are the red, yellow, and blue colour buttons. To the left of the buttons is the score counter, and at the top of the screen there is a progress meter. The more accurately the player matches the colours and scores points, the longer they stay in the game and the further the meter’s arrow moves to the right. As accuracy increases, the game’s speed also increases.
Chameleon Show is a theatre play in which all the props are made of wood. The chameleon runs across the stage and needs to remain camouflaged at all times. The challenge is to camouflage the chameleon quickly by blending up to three colours at once! To do this, players must match the chameleon’s colour to the background by pressing one of the primary colour buttons.
To create secondary colours, the child must press the two primary colours that combine to form them. If the background turns white, all three primary colours need to be pressed simultaneously! In addition to learning about primary colours and how they mix to form secondary ones, the game supports the development of logical reasoning and motor coordination.
At the end of the game, it is always helpful to check the player’s position on the scoreboard to see if there has been any improvement.
Learning and Development Objectives
Engaging with colourful shapes, textures, sounds, and silences promotes the development of children’s expressiveness and creativity, while also fostering their emotional growth. It is important to allow children to explore, understand, and interact with the world around them in increasingly autonomous and critical way
Lines, Sounds, Colours, and Shapes (EI02TS02)
Use a variety of materials that allow for manipulation, exploring colours, textures, surfaces, planes, shapes, and volumes.
Curricular Component: ART
Exploring and recognizing allows students to perceive, understand, and work with visual elements—in this case, colour—identifying them across various forms of artistic expression, such as visual arts, audiovisual media, graphic design, and technological art, in both analog and digital formats. This skill initially involves experimenting with a form of expression, and then identifying its visual elements.
(EF15AR02) Explore and recognize the fundamental elements of visual arts (dot, line, shape, colour, space, movement, etc.).
(EF15AR26) Explore different technologies and digital resources (multimedia, animations, video games, audio and video recordings, photography, software, etc.) in the process of artistic creation.
Executive functions are cognitive skills that support the development of abilities such as planning, organization, decision-making, and impulse control.
In Special Education, educational software encourages and reinforces even minimal behaviours related to impulse inhibition, planning, sustained attention, and concentration.
Motor planning, motor sequencing, and fine motor execution are functions associated with the frontal lobes and executive functions. For example, visual searches for images help assess a student’s capacity for attention, concentration, and the orderly search for objects (monitoring and planning). This supports students in better directing and sustaining their attentional focus, helping them develop inhibitory control. It also strengthens skills such as learning to make and evaluate decisions, building self-confidence to face stressful situations, and improving quick thinking, reasoning, and problem-solving when facing challenges.
