V-Motion Potion

A month or so ago we had the occasion to play around with a Wii at a friend's house. Truth be told, I thought the whole Wii thing seemed ridiculous, but after giving it a go I realized that it was pretty fun. More fun with beer, but still, I now understood the appeal. So when my favorite ParentBlogger women asked if my daughter and I would like to review The V-Motion Active Learning System I immediately thought of that night (minus the beer) and happily agreed.


The V-Motion is geared for ages 3-7 and has some similarities to the Wii in the sense there is a motion controller and interaction with the screen. The games are simple yet challenging, one game involves playing tennis and using the controller to "swing" the racket, while another involves driving a car and the other, a bobsled race. Each of the games includes a learning element, whether it's number sequences or spelling letters, both of which my child is tackling now so the game was a fun way to engage her, especially when she could tell me what to do. But then again telling me what to do always seems to go over pretty well.


She found the driving game to be the easiest and the bobsled game to be the trickiest (I happen to agree with her) but I think some of that was a function of age and learning how to use the controller. Each of the games gives good instructions prior and makes it easy for little ones to understand and some of the technical motions will advance as she gets older. She picked up on it quickly and knew what to do and it was precious watching her bounce around the room throwing her full body into motion. She also bossed me around a lot and didn't like it when I missed the letters and that made her pretty happy too.


It's obviously not a substitute for traditional exercise and full contact playtime but V-Motion offers a sweet combination of learning and coordination activities that makes this an easy choice when we are looking for something fun to do. I like how companies are getting smarter and incorporating multiple learning options in games that are also fun to play and I like how the games we tried were devoid of specific character themes so we weren't having to wrestle with our own personal distaste for all things Dora. Most of the additional games you can purchase do seem to be character specific, which is good or bad depending on your tastes, I think having non-branded characters are important even if they don't sell as well as the others.

All in all we were very happy to get to review this product - it's educational and fun at the same time and M's wanted to play with it multiple times this week.