Over the last couple of days I’ve been getting various notices about two new MMORPGs for preschool children by Disney and Nickleodeon. The first notice that I found was on paidContent.org. Then a couple of blog postings announcing the new services and pointing out that they aren’t anything new. All this buzz left me wondering a couple of things.

Didn’t Disney Just Buy an MMORPG for Kids?

Yes, they most certainly did: Club Penguin for $700 million. Club Penguin is for children aged 6-12. Disney’s new offering, Bunnytown, will tie-in with a Sunday-morning puppet show for preschool children.

Having taught English in kindergarten for a number of years and now putting together Ask Olli, I am curious about the possibility of using these and other services to teach English. I went to MyNoggin and had a look at their demo. I have to say, there are a lot of things that they do really well (like tracking development and presenting new games as the child learns, providing achievement awards and a place to keep and display them). I didn’t stay long enough to evaluate whether it would be useful for children studying English, but there is a lot for children to enjoy.

This leads me to another thing that I was wondering about.

How young is too young?

Your preschool child might learn better math, language, and problem solving skills. But what about social skills? I can easily imagine a situation where a child gets too involved in one of these games and ends up socially impaired later in life. I know it’s a little alarmist, but the 3-6 age-range is really important to the social development of children. It’s excessive use that I am most worried about—any parent who knows how to say no shouldn’t have anything to worry about.

Get your claws into them early.

Disney should get some credit for being upfront about their motives: they want to build the brand and market their show. I don’t have any comment on this except to say read this blog about a product being marketed to children in Japan and then…

Think.

Cry.

Laugh.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 1:25 am and is filed under eLearning, Children's English. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.