> ed-tech games have a fairly low density of actual useful learning. I can attest to this: eager to give my son a head start on the phonetic skills involved in reading, I tried a few different iPad games with him. He mostly messed around randomly until he got the reward, largely ignoring the educational content to fixate on the cute cartoon characters.

I feel like defaulting to an ipad game is the wrong move here.

We solved this in the 90's! https://archive.org/search?query=emulator%3A%28*%29+jumpstar...