Review ~ Mayan Mysteries From Dig-It! Games: Interactive History Learning

Kids love learning about Mayan history with this fun interactive game! Travel through time, and race the thieves to protect Mayan artifacts.

Disclosure: I received a free copy of this product for review, all opinions are 100% my own.

Our children love video games but I guess most kids do right?! I do try to find games that are more educational in nature so I was so excited to have the opportunity to review Mayan Mysteries from Dig-It! Games again.

I reviewed this program some time ago when our oldest daughter was using it. At that time the game hadn’t been finished so I knew that the kids would love to play it again.

Learn About Mayan History

Dig-It! Games have created a variety of online educational games and apps for iOS that are fun for the whole family.

The game we have been playing is called Mayan Mysteries gives the player a good look at the Mayan civilization while you're on the hunt for a looter who has been digging up artifacts. In the story, Professor Ale Quinn is called in to find the looter.

The professor brings along his niece Fiona and nephew Charlie. Now it’s time for Team Q to solve mysteries and find the city of Ich’aak. The looters name is Ladrone and he is causing a lot of problems! Your team has to learn about the Mayan culture and solve puzzles and challenges to stop him.

Mayan Mysteries was created for children in grades 5 to 9 but it’s really fun for anyone! Since there is an audio option it opens up the learning for younger children and toughs who struggle with reading. The challenges you face along the way teach memory skills, map skills, math, and history.

• 9 plus hours of gameplay

• For grades 5-9

• Interactive learning

• Online and iPad

• Encyclopaedia with 450+ entries on Mayan culture and related studies

Using Mayan Mysteries

I had intended for dd11 to use this program because she LOVES history, any type of history. So I knew she would like it. Since the reading selections are really long she was glad to have the audio option.

Unfortunately, when it came to the quiz part we couldn’t figure out how to get the audio to play to read the questions and answers. So she teamed up with her big sister who was happy to play along and they would read the quizzes together.

Dd13 had played this game a while ago before it was finished so she was happy to play it again and be able to work to the end! Our kids have been playing this game together for at least 20 minutes each day.  They love it!

Mayan Mysteries Fun Online History Game

I have to say that I just love Mayan Mysteries! It is one of our favourite educational games for history. The storyline is interesting and the format of the story is done like a comic book.

There is a lot of text to read in each section and that can take younger readers or slower readers a while to work through.

Because of that, I’ve really glad that they have an audio option! You can either click the speaker button on the screen or select to have the audio autoplay in the game settings.

The only downside to this game that I can see is that we couldn’t figure out how to get the audio on the quiz pages to play. There wasn’t a speaker symbol on these pages. Since the quizzes can use some large words and have many options I think it would be a good idea to have an audio option here too!

The other possible downside is that because there is so much reading and just so much information in each game section I’m not sure how much will be remembered from playing it.  My kid’s tell me it’s not a problem because they will play it more than once!

But if you were using this as a main part of your history curriculum then it’s something to consider. Breaking up the lessons might make for more retention.

What my 11-year-old thinks:

I think it’s really helpful with history because it explains a lot in a way that I like to learn.  It says things slow enough to hear well.  The games and challenges are really fun, my favourite is the one when you dig up ancient pieces of coins and pottery.  It shows me how Mayan people did, used and lived.

What can I say this game is a big hit here! I only wish that their other games were also available online or for the Android tablet and not only the iPad. They look so fun!