When your child loves dinosaurs: a game that feeds the passion

What your child learns from dinosaurs

Dinosaurs come with long words, like Brachiosaurus, and children can say them out loud, syllable by syllable. The game adds herbivore, carnivore, fossil and paleontologist.

Dinosaurs also teach thinking skills. Sorting food for a plant eater and a meat eater is classifying. Seeing how many times your child fits inside a T-Rex is measuring. Brushing sand off a bone is patience.

The game keeps time simple: dinosaurs lived long, long ago, before there were any people, houses or cars.

• Big words, heard often and in context, until they feel easy
• Sorting by a rule: plants for one dinosaur, meat for the other
• Comparing lengths, from a chicken-sized dinosaur to a long-neck almost as long as two buses
• How we know about animals no person has ever seen: fossils

Why we made this game

One question about dinosaurs deserves a real answer: how do we know? Nobody has ever seen a living T-Rex. So how can anyone say what it ate or how big it was?

The game answers by letting children be the scientist. They brush away sand and find a skull, eggs, a footprint or a curly ammonite shell. Each find comes with a short story read aloud.

We also wanted to show that dinosaurs did not all vanish. Birds are their living relatives, and natural history museums call birds living dinosaurs.

We also wanted honest answers. When nobody knows, the game says so. What did dinosaurs sound like? Nobody knows for sure. Scientists say so too: no fossil can tell us yet.

What children love about it

In the fossil dig, children sweep with a finger, a brush follows, and a shape slowly appears. Every round hides five different finds.

On the food screen, give a bone to the plant eater and it says no thank you. Mistakes are funny here, so children can keep experimenting.

On the size screen, your child picks a dinosaur and something to compare: their own name, Dad or a bus. Then they hear how many times it fits.

The quiz ends with dinner time. Every right answer goes into the T-Rex's bowl, and the T-Rex grows. A second round is one tap away, to make it even bigger.

For quieter moments, the memory game has 4, 6 or 8 pairs, with eggs, ferns, feathers and volcanoes.

How to play it together

Before playing, ask your child what they already know about dinosaurs. You may be surprised. Let them be the expert, and you be the curious one.

Let your child press the yellow dots on the T-Rex and repeat the new words after the game. Saying herbivore or paleontologist out loud, again and again, is half the fun.

Afterward, go on a living dinosaur hunt. Look for birds in the park and check their feet: most have three toes pointing forward, like the footprint in the game. Ask which dinosaur cousin it might be.

Planning a visit to a natural history museum? Play the dig screen the day before. Then hunt for a real skull, eggs and a footprint in the museum together.