My colleague Paul told me about Yenka over the weekend, so I downloaded it and have been having a bit of a play. Yenka is a new generation of educational modelling tools from Crocodile Clips. Although it’s been around for nearly a year now, this was the first time I’d heard of it, and being interested in anything that helps with visualisation and learning, I wanted to try it out 🙂
If you’re a secondary science, maths, technology or computing teacher you’ll definitely find this of interest.
Yenka is a downloadable app for Macs and PCs, which is available free for home users, or for a small fee for educational use in schools. I like this arrangement as it’s yet another example of a product that can be introduced in the school environment for students to be able to use on their home PC by simply downloading at no cost.
Withiun the Yenka product there are a range of things you can do. Yenka Coordinates is a free modelling tool for teaching about 2D and 3D coordinates, while Yenka Sequences is an innovative tool for introducing programming. Yenka Electricity and Magnetism allows you to simulate the generation, transmission and use of electrical energy, in full 3D. And these are just some of the things available from a suite of opportunities focusing on the areas of science, computing, mathematics and technology.
For primary teachers, check out another product from the Crocodile Clips group – called Bunja, it’s an innovative educational toy for teaching mental arithmetic.
I used some of the first programmes developed by Crocodile Chips when teaching electronics and basic circuit design many years ago. It made learning fun principally because it was possible to create so many simulations and make the mistakes essential to sound learning. All without hours of drudgery for the students. Just one word of caution. In my view having real objects and models to touch and smell keeps the learning authentic and more memorable. In the UK there has been a sharp reduction in practical science experiments and materials handling with inevitable results. I need not elaborate on that for this audience.