PLAYBOOKS: FOR PC INTERNET

Insaniquarium

Kids will be able to interact with their own zany virtual aquarium. Players must feed and defend their fish to make it through every level!

Game play alone results in modest improvements in real-world executive skills. Please refer to our Playbook Tutorial, general coaching and comprehensive guides to transfer game skills to sustainable real-life behaviors.

QUICK FACTS

Game Type: Action, Strategy
Platform/Console: PC Internet (available also as a downloadable file, CD, and for phones and PDAs)
Other Requirements : PopCap player (provided at popcap.com), Internet connection
LWK Recommended Age: 5+

 

This Game is Good for Kids Who Need Help With:

• Setting priorities, destinations, or goals (planning)
• Considering information before jumping into puzzles and mazes (planning)
• Broadening their attention span enough to not be oblivious (sustained attention)
• Narrowing their attention span enough to not be distracted by everything (sustained attention)

What You Need to Know About the Game:

You can find Insaniquarium by visiting the popcap.com website. Scroll down the page and click on the "Play Online" button.

Solutions:

Parents, teachers, and other helpers can find useful guides and walkthroughs by visitng insaniquariumguide.com or neoseeker.com.

This Game Can Help Your Kids With Planning:

This game is good for kids who display difficulty with setting priorities, destinations or goals and considering information before jumping into puzzles and mazes, because:

• There is much planning to do in Insaniquarium. Dropping food for your fish, purchasing more fish, and saving for upgrades, all require careful timing and preparation. Creating a strategy is especially important when beginning a new level since the player has limited resources. Purchasing too many fish or feeding a fish too soon at the start of a level could result in unnecessary fish deaths and considerable money loss. 

Talking points: 

• How do you know when a fish needs to be fed?
• How did planning help you to examine possible outcomes?
• How can creating a strategy in “Insaniquarium” help you to give good suggestions for solving problems?

Making it real:

• Encourage your child to brainstorm and write down possible steps for planning for a school project, birthday party, or for buying gifts for others during the holiday season. Keep a binder of successful plans for future reference.

This Game Can Help Your Kids With Sustained Attention

This game is good for kids who display difficulty with broadening their attention span enough to not be oblivious and narrowing their attention span enough to not be distracted by everything, because they must:

• Always be ready to shift back and forth between feeding fish, catching coins, and fending off aliens. They also need to be ready to participate in two or more of these events at the same time. The environment in Insaniquarium is always changing, so attention is important. Sometimes the player will have to temporarily ignore fish and falling money to concentrate on a more pressing issue: alien attacks. If the aliens are left to roam freely they will terrorize your fish who will then die. The player must concentrate on getting rid of the aliens as soon as possible, regardless of how much money is being dropped.

Talking points: 

• What happens during an alien attack?
• How did sustaining your attention help you to attend to multiple sources of information (fish, coins, aliens)?
• How can attending to fish, aliens, and coins all at once help you to shift your behavior to meet the needs of the moment?

Making it real:

• Challenge your child to sustain his/her effort and attention to a task for a specified time. Depending on your child’s age and abilities, start off with an amount of time at which you know he/she can be readily successful. Gradually increase the amount of time, for example, going from ten to twelve minutes to work on a homework task. Keep a chart of this on the refrigerator; use a timer that has some type of alarm at the end of it, but keep the timer out of the child’s line of vision. Talk to your child about using his/her sustained attention as a form of exercise, similar to that of lifting heavier and heavier weights with practice.