List of Learning and Educational Games for the Nintendo DS

When my children first played with Nintendo DS they were very excited by Mario Kart, Yoshi's Island and Nintendogs. But the desire to learn is in all of us and so when Brain Age and Brain Age 2 came out I got my own DS just to play these two games.

Now there are many more educational DS games for both adults and children. To children, learning on the DS can be as much fun as playing video games. Here is a list of educational DS games that you and your children may enjoy, and there are many more new educational games coming out all the time, especially near Christmas.

There are more educational games for the DS than any other console, but watch out for the Wii and PlayStations following suit.

As an adult these are my favorite two DS games. Brain Age has Suduku and Brain Age 2 has Virus Buster, a game that helps me relax. I like the fact that I can play these games and my children can play them too. I do gravitate to the games I'm better at rather than trying to improve my scores in the games I'm not so good at.

This one I bought for myself and my children ended up playing and enjoying it. I do have a math degree and I did find the math a little easy. Some of the games are speed games and I enjoyed those, but I did give up on it quickly. My elementary child, however, played with it for much longer than I did.

You enter your age and are given age appropriate words to spell or unscramble. Then you collect coins depending on how you did. The game is fun and fast paced. The only minus is that you see the words you are spelling, you never hear them.

I bought The Spanish Coach for my daughter when she was 8. She had no knowledge of the language and at first found the game fun. But it listens to her pronunciation and won't move on until she says it correctly. That was it, she was stuck. I tried to get her to go back to the game later, but she wasn't interested in it, and we sold it.

My opinion is that these games may help you if you are learning a language, but for a main way of learning we bought Rosetta Stone and had better success with that.

We didn't buy this one, being native English speakers, but it seems a good idea for Hispanic children to help them learn the English language.

For Grades 2-8. I haven't bought this game myself, but I read the reviews on Amazon. They don't look too good. If you are thinking of buying this game, please read the Amazon reviews first.

For Grades 1-4. Release date November 2010. It looks like it is produced by the same people who made Learn Geography, listed above.

This is a really fun word game, with 6 different games and many different levels. I enjoyed it and so did my children because it works at their level. It is well written and if you play it for a while, your vocabulary will improve.

For ages 5-12, but the games don't have levels so it didn't really work with my younger children. The beauty of many video games is that they have multiple levels and once a level is mastered, the child can rise a level. This game doesn't have that feature, it starts with multiplication, so if your child hasn't met multiplication yet don't buy them this game.

There are many fun facts here if you enjoy learning, but the pace is rather slow. It's aimed at children 12-18, or adults.

This game has not yet been released. It's due for release October 31, 2010 and is meant to be for everyone. Beyond that, I don't know anything about it.

I've heard so much about vision training, but never tried it with my children as it always seemed too expensive. But here is a DS game with vision training in only minutes a day for under $20. To be honest I just bought this today so I can't write a review. Check back in a couple of weeks to see if I liked it.

After Brain Age and Brain Age 2, I bought this game. I would say it's nearly as good. I played it a lot, but then went back to Brain Age 2. It's very similar to the Brain Age games in format, but I kept changing the date to see if I could beat my high scores as you can only try and beat your scores once a day.

Now, for me, I'm really looking for Brain Age Infinity for Geeks. I think I'll wait until something like that comes out before I buy another game for me.