Heroes II for Maths

Fai was introduced to this game when he was about 4 years old. He was enthralled by the mysthical beasts, castles and knights he encountered.



In the beginning I was deadset against allowing the introduction of computer games to Fai but I relented when I realised it allowed a hardworking father some down time, allowed for some father-son bonding and perhaps get some lessons on accumulating resources, training your team and exploring new frontiers and most importantly let me have some time to myself.

Now Fai is teaching his younger brother Han the ropes of the game.
Here is a scenario from last week:
Fai was fiddling with the lego blocks and Han was playing Heroes II. Without shifting his eyes from his blocks, Fai telling Han " Don't go there or your troop will have low morale"
I couldn't believe my ears.
"Huh.....er....why would your troops have low morale, Fai and what would happen if they do get low morale?"
Fai : "I don't like to go there because my hero will move very slowly...like they are dragging their feet"

Well, that's low morale to Fai.....draggy feet.

And yesterday he was asked by his dad to didvide 88 griffins between 2 heroes and without batting an eyelash he said "You mean 44 each?"

Another time his dad said he had too much sulphur (he had 64 units) and he told Fai to give away 44 and in a flash, a few clicks later he had 20 units of sulphur left.

That's maths applied in a fun way.

Fai has also been introduced to Settlers II. I used to play this game way back when I had time to spare. He has caught on to the game rather quickly and knows the chronology of things to build such as grain farm before the mill and after that the bakery and iron mine before the weapons smith.

This reminds me of the movie 'Aliens in the attic' where the kids battle the aliens with skills they acquired from playing Wii and XBox.

Now if only computer games are not such as addiction.....