Spark: Daily Learning Puzzles

I have introduced a healthier start to my morning routine by using four apps—Vocabulary, Facts, Elevate and Spark Puzzles. You truly learn something new every day! It’s not a bunch of overwhelming facts in your face just giving you something else to read. It’s hands-on and requires you to give an ounce of your attention. There are four components: - This or That: You have to put things in a category. For example, if you have the words Dine and Dash, you must determine if the following words are a type of dinner or dash. To elaborate, Chow vs Scram. - Chrono: You must put things in order based on the year. They start you off with one fact and you must decide if the other facts are before or after. For example, the invention of the “em” dash vs the invention of the character Dash from The Incredibles vs the invention of Door Dash. You must decide if goes before or after the given fact and year. - Links: You have four rounds. Each round you are given a certain amount of cards and therefore, must decide where to place them. As each round progresses, the cards will link together. For example, an animal that sleeps standing up is a Bison. But you must also link the other animal that also sleeps standing up. - Hindsight: This feature is not yet released but I’m looking forward to it. Overall, this is a five star app and I downloaded it as soon as it became available. I only hope that they have a grandfather or lifetime price. I enjoy lifetime access versus paying yearly or if so hope founding members could be grandfathered in.

This app is just getting started, so of course it doesn’t have a lot of games/puzzles yet. Just three new ones per day. But, based on other apps this company does, I have no doubt it will be amazing. You get fun daily themes to learn little tidbits and facts about any topic. One improvement I hope they implement, since the premise of the app is learning — in games where you sort the cards, it’ll say “click the card to learn more”. So, let’s say, the game reveals that a vampire squid has a beak. So you think, wow what? And you click on the card. All it will tell you is the name of the animal/object/place and some super basic facts - animals will usually say where they live, type of animal, and if they are endangered. A country will say its population and capital and a few basic statistics. BUT THE CARDS DO NOT ELABORATE ON THE FACT IN THE GAME YOU JUST LEARNED! You just get abstract facts and no more context. The “this or that” and “chrono” games give you great information. The “links” game gives you almost nothing. I hope they improve this in the future.

This app is something that I came about randomly, but it is genuinely one of my favorite apps I’ve ever gotten. I appreciate how, despite there only being 3 games a day, it is not overly addictive (like how some games/apps try to be). It is something that makes me want to learn new things! A few more mini games would be wonderful, but even how it is now is perfect. It gives off NYT games, but with more learning and enjoyability (and overall just better!). In the future, please keep this a low stakes sort of app! I love having the calmness of this app that entices you not by rewards/slot machine activity/solely daily streaks, but by the actual activity of learning about new topics. Thank you so much to every developer for this app!! You all are pearls in the sea of mediocre games.