This is the sweetest game ever!

-- 3rd grade student


Skatekids Online loads fast, and is really fun to play and is challenging. My best friend loves Snowboard Blast. We were going to be late for a baseball game and Joey would not stop playing!

-- 2nd grade student


I play every time I go to my mom's work. I almost have enough for a house.

-- 3rd grade student


My character looks just like me!

-- 4th grade girl




Parents

In our most recent experience with the computer program, our son found it fun; his confidence improved greatly. Skatekids Online made it fun for him. He was learning, but didn't really know it.

-- Mom of 11 year old


We all noticed improvement in his computer skills and he went from a 20 minute 100 question math test to finishing in 8.5 minutes this year! His concentration improved.

-- Parent of 4th grade student




Schools

Skatekids Online is a hit. My daughter used to play a popular online product but now she and her friends play Skatekids Online.

-- 5th grade teacher


I was surprised by how many children play it at home. I asked them and almost all of them are doing it away from school.

-- Media Specialist, School Media Center


We have opened the lab @7:30 in the a.m. Tues. - Fri. for Skatekids. I sent home a permission letter asking for 75 2nd-5th grade students to do Skatekids and I had approx. 120 letters returned to me...I created a scheduling nightmare!!! So I am now working out a solution to that one! The kids are working hard and enjoying themselves.

We have one student who is never on time that told his mother he had to be @ school @ 7:30 on Tuesdays. She came in to ask and we assured her that was the case. She had to go back out and get him out of the car as he was sleeping. He has great difficulty learning so I am just so impressed that he enjoys Skatekids so much that he would make sure he got here on time to do it.

-- School Administrator




Professionals

Dr. Fletcher and his team at Quantum Learning Technologies have put together an outstanding suite of mind-powered games that are highly motivating and captivating for students. To call them games simply doesn't do it justice. Although they are very cleverly designed to meet the interests of today's digital natives, Skatekids games are powerful tools that have great potential to help students enhance the cognitive processes that are the foundation of all learning. The built-in incentives sustain students' motivation to succeed at the games, and as anyone who tries Skatekids will attest, there is simply no way succeed at these games without activating foundation cognitive skills such as attention, working memory, holistic thinking, and problem-solving.

Students are highly motivated to play and succeed at Skatekids. What they don't realize is that they are essentially practicing and automatizing the very same skills that support decoding, comprehension, and learning in general.

One factor that differentiates an effective learner from a struggling learner is that effective learners are actively engaged in the learning experience. Attention is focused, key cognitive processes to understand and remember information are utilized, and the student self-monitors and problem-solves about how to accomplish tasks. I would encourage interested educators to try the games themselves. It's a great way to understand the level of focused cognitive activity and engagement necessary to interact with this suite of games. They will easily see that this is the same level and type of cognitive activity required for effective reading and effective learning.

-- Jennifer Holmberg, Ph.D.
Licensed Psychologist and Learning Specialist
Ann Arbor, MI


In the last 25 years, researchers have made considerable progress in understanding how children learn basic skills like reading and math and in partcular, the relationship between acquisition of these skills and cognitive processes. The connections between cognition and learning have been particularly important for understanding the underlying processes tha can lead to efficient learning as well as learning difficulties. As these relationships become better understood, so does our ability to teach children more effectively. That is, we should teach with an understanding of the skills that need to be learned and the cognitive processes (also known as abilities) that make learning possible. What impresses me most about Skatekids Online TM is that the authors of this exceptional instructional program have merged an excellent understanding of the academic skills lie reading and math children must have with a modern view of what cognitive processes underlie acquisition of these skills.

-- Dr. Jack A. Naglieri
Center for Cognitive Development
George Mason University