MentalUP Educational Games

What is MentalUP

MentalUP is an award-winning brain game for children between 4 and 13 years. MentalUP was developed by game designers and academics incorporating innovative teaching methods to offer dozens of mind games with suitable difficulty levels to improve cognitive skills in a gamified format to engage children. The ability to solve problems and think in new ways is as important as the knowledge of how to read or do maths. 

Is MentalUP free?

MentalUP is free to download on iOS and Android devices. 

How much MentalUP does cost?

MentalUP is a subscription-based app but you can try it out first before signing up. MentalUP subscriptions start at $19.99 for 3 months or you can subscribe for a year for $35.99.

How does MentalUP work

Brain games have long been popular with children and adults alike. They are fun, help to pass the time, and they feel like they have more value than a purely entertainment-based game.  Scientific research is not conclusive on all of the proposed benefits of brain training but such games do provide a sense of satisfaction and highlight that thinking problems through will lead to success.

Children, in particular, can be too quick to resort to the familiar claim of "I don't get it," when an answer does not pop into their heads in a few seconds.  Brain training games and puzzles can be useful to show them that they should not always expect answers without some thought first.  In education, this is often described as persistence or grit - the willingness to stick with a problem until a solution is reached as opposed to abandoning it as impossible after only a little thought.

MentalUP does brain training well. Its games are easy to understand while challenging the skills which they are designed to stretch.  Each game begins with a short and to the point instruction and then the timed exercise begins. They look fantastic with clear and bright graphics that would fit easily into a pure entertainment app.

After downloading from the Google Play Store or App Stores you are ready to set up your account. Players (or their parents) can set up the app to be biased towards helping certain skills and to take the user's age into account. A reports page provides a record of accomplishments and progress. A player avatar can also be upgraded with cosmetic items by spending the in-game currency that is earned through success.  

Playing this app will not be a chore for children and, while it is not directly linked to their school work, the results of brain training are supposed to raise attainment through a general raising of a multitude of skills rather than through topic-focused support.

The scoring of the challenges is good, as your own is recorded but also matched up against the average of other players. This makes it satisfying to beat your own personal best as well as overtake the rest of the app's player base.  Each game makes it clear which aspects it tests such as memory, visual intelligence, logical reasoning, and others. There are many game types per category.

Any issues with the design of these games are mostly intrinsic to logic games as a whole. Logic and reasoning in a game are rarely able to be completely isolated and a player's background and general knowledge can prove a limitation in a game that is challenging something quite different. This is the case in apps and even such things as IQ tests and college entrance exams. 

For example, in this app, a word game that is based around food may well feature items that a player has never encountered, either due to geographic reasons or due to socio-economic background.  Of course, this does expose players, in some way, to these new words and could help overcome such problems in other situations where such knowledge is expected. Indeed, the thinking style developed in this app could be linked to the English 11+ exam and probably the equivalent in other countries. Being familiar with the challenges provided in these puzzles should help children feel less intimidated by the preparation and the experience of taking the 11+.

Some cues used to solve puzzles may not be within a player's physical ability. Players with colour perception difficulties will not be able to succeed in at least one game in this app. This is perhaps one that should have been designed out as it is quite possible to achieve the same ends without relying solely on colour as a distinguishing difference.

Teachers may find it useful for children who seem to be lacking in a specific skill.  Parents will like to have an app that children like to play but which feels like it has more educational worth than many of the time-passing casual apps that exist.  The developers recommend twenty minutes use per day.  

There are many brain training apps but few with such a well-produced and broad set of games within them.  You should check out the trial and make a decision from there.