![\"BRAIN_BOX\"](\"http:\/\/www.gamingwithchildren.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/12\/BRAIN_BOX-150x134.jpg\" "\\"BRAIN_BOX\\"")
Junior Brain Trainer is an educational brain-training game for elementary school-aged children. It teaches early math, reading, and English skills, and it\u2019s like having your very own school workbook right on your Nintendo DS.<\/p>\nJunior Brain Trainer is an educational brain-training game for elementary school-aged children. It teaches early math, reading, and English skills, and it\u2019s like having your very own school workbook right on your Nintendo DS.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
The main game features five different random exercises that teach early elementary school skills. There\u2019s math: addiction, subtraction, multiplication, and division. There are also spelling exercises, sentence structure, and other reading and English activities. Plus pair matching, geometry, and more. I\u2019ve never encountered the same exercise twice, and the whole experience really took me back to my school days working out of workbooks where little illustrated animals inside taught us our multiplication tables.<\/p>\n
There are three main problems with Junior Brain Trainer, though. One, sometimes the instructions to the exercises are not as clear. Sometimes I wasn\u2019t sure at first if I needed to click on a blank to enter my answer, or drag and drop with the stylus. It\u2019s easy to figure out with a little fiddling and noodling around, though.<\/p>\n
![\"BRAIN_SCREEN\"](\"http:\/\/www.gamingwithchildren.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/12\/BRAIN_SCREEN.jpg\" "\\"BRAIN_SCREEN\\"")
The second problem I had is that the game only takes one right answer, even if there could be more. For instance, one game wanted you to fill in the blank to spell words, and one of them was \u2018R_IN.\u2019 Well I put in \u2018u\u2019 to spell \u2018ruin,\u2019 but the game wouldn\u2019t take it. They wanted \u2018rain.\u2019 Another time I was unscrambling letters to spell words and I came up with \u2018finder,\u2019 which was wrong according to the game. They wanted \u2018friend.\u2019 But when I was in school, there were TONS of instances where I had the right answer, but it wasn\u2019t the one the teacher wanted.<\/p>\n
The last main problem is how you unlock bonuses in the game. After doing a set of exercises daily, you\u2019re supposed to be able to unlock a fun arcade game, quiz, or story to read. I managed to do that once, but on subsequent days, it would either say I\u2019ve already unlocked a bonus for that day, or it wouldn\u2019t unlock anything at all. Even when I manually changed the calendar on my DS. So I was a little unclear on how unlocking stuff worked. But the bonus activity I did unlock was pretty fun: it was a Pac-Man-like game where a snake gobbles up dots and grows, and you have to keep it from biting its ever-elongated tail (actually there was an arcade game like that called Nibbler). So I bet the other unlockable games are pretty entertaining, too.<\/p>\n
Despite its problems, Junior Brain Trainer may be good math and reading practice for your elementary school kids. Obviously, early reading and math skills are a must. Junior Brain Trainer is rated E for Everyone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Junior Brain Trainer is an educational brain-training game for elementary school-aged children. It teaches early math, reading, and English skills, and it\u2019s like having your very own school workbook right on your Nintendo DS. \u00a0 The main game features five different random exercises that teach early elementary school skills. There\u2019s math: addiction, subtraction, multiplication, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-game-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3644\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}