Players can guide groups of Zoombinis through the series of puzzles in Journey Mode or challenge themselves to a particular puzzle and difficulty level in Practice Mode. Twelve perilous puzzles, four levels of difficulty, an appealing story, and memorable characters make for a fun, engaging experience for everyone.

Zoombinis is a fun and exciting way to engage kids, teens, and adults alike in logic and computational skills. We’re in between research studies*, but the game Zoombinis is available (and currently on sale) for tablets through the app stores, as well as available for computers from STEAM <. Education is completely topsy-turvy, with many people - possibly including you - scrambling to figure out good options in a terrible situation. As you say, the “bridge condition” is a place where teachers may involve their students in connecting what a player is doing in a puzzle to a general CT skill, reflecting on the process of finding a solution, and transferring what they are doing to other contexts. In addition, experience with research on our other games suggests that gameplay alone can help build tacit understanding of concepts, but that the role of the teacher is vital to players making the connection between those tacit understandings and explicit school content. Completely anecdotally, we can see shifts in players’ behavior when they move from from randomly trying things, to testing a hypothesis, to implementing a solution for some players, repeated experience with this probably does involve building an awareness that’s beyond the specifics of a particular puzzle. Tamara, again, we’re only at the very beginning stages of our research, so unfortunately, we don’t have enough data to be answering questions like this yet.

Zoombinis free online game