Osmo Makes Learning Fun and Gaming Educational
Having seen adverts for the Osmo iPad peripheral I was intrigued how well this would work in the home, a real messy family home.
After spending a day trying it out with my family it was a great addition to both homework and play time.
The peripheral comes in two pieces:
- A stand for your iPad
- A red lozenge to reflect the camera down towards the table.
This way it can see different play pieces that are placed in front of it. The field of view here is wider than you might imagine and sets up an impressive play space. Even on patterned surfaces Osmo quickly identified the tokens we had placed in front of it during play.
The unit comes with three games, Tangram shape matching, Newton real time physics and Words spelling challenge. It was the latter of these three that really hooked my family in. The screen of the iPad is used to display different photographs and players either team up or compete to complete a certain word of an objects in the scene.
It's a little like hang-man with a picture clue. In the same way you have a limited number of guesses. Each letter you get right scores 2 points but each one you get wrong costs 1 point if you don't complete the challenge.
The clever part of all this was how well Osmo adjusted to the ability of the players. Unless I'm imagining it the quicker players were at guessing the harder the picture puzzles became. This meant that once the kids had gone to bed I could happily play with my wife and still have a considerable challenge. It seems like the perfect after dinner party game.
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Osmo Tangram Game[/caption]
As you can see from the video, our whole family really enjoyed our time with it from the oldest to the youngest.
More information on the Osmo website.
