Little Lanterns

Small games that light up curious minds. Made by a mom, tested at the dinner table.

▶ Play now: little-lanterns-nine.vercel.app · free, no ads, no sign-up, works on a tablet

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Why

Most learning apps for little kids are built to keep them tapping: streaks, loot, ads, timers, a fail screen when they get it wrong. These games were built for the kids at our own table instead, with the opposite goals. Short sessions. Gentle feedback. Nothing to buy. Something a parent can sit beside and enjoy too.

Wrong answers wiggle and say "try again". There are no fail screens.

The games

Word Garden · sight words, ages 4–5

Play Word Garden

Every word is a seed. Get it right and it sprouts, then buds, then blooms. Six mini-games practise the same handful of sight words in different ways, so repetition never feels like repetition. A word only earns a point when it wasn't missed earlier in the round, so the garden reflects real learning, not lucky taps.

Grown-ups can add words from a settings screen hidden behind a simple addition question.

Table Talk · dinner trivia, ages 4–8

Play Table Talk

340 questions across Indian culture, science, animals, space, geography, history, technology, food, the human body and two sight-word lists. Every question ends with a fun fact to keep the conversation going. Each player gets their own level (easy for 4–5, tricky for 6–8), and the whole thing is read aloud, so pre-readers can play alongside older siblings.

Peekaworld · the world, the USA and space

Play Peekaworld

A soft, pastel, talking map with a Find It! game. Separate repo.

Small details that took the most work

• Every word is heard, on every device. Cheap kids' tablets (Amazon Fire's Silk browser especially) often have no working speech synthesis. So every word, letter, question, answer, fun fact and cheer is a pre-recorded clip, about 1,400 for Table Talk alone, generated by scripts and played through WebAudio, with speech synthesis only as a fallback.
• Read-aloud that doesn't give the answer away. In the sight-word round, answers are never read aloud, and a question can display one thing and say another ("Tap the word you hear").
• "a" is said "uh". On its own, "a" is read as the letter name. It's recorded the way a teacher says it.
• One plain-text question bank. Table Talk's questions live in tools/trivia.txt, one line each. A script builds the game data, shuffles answers with a fixed seed so they stay stable, and records only the clips that are missing.
• Fits without scrolling. Every screen fits a laptop and an upright tablet with nothing to scroll past.

Run it

Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript. No build step, no dependencies.

python3 -m http.server 8090   # then open http://localhost:8090

Add a game

1. Create a folder, such as counting-stars/, with its own index.html.
2. Add a tile to the root index.html, before the "More on the way" tile.
3. Include <script src="../shared/nav.js" defer></script> before </body> and list the game in GAMES in shared/nav.js. This adds the lantern menu for getting home or switching games.
4. Prefix the game's localStorage keys (Word Garden uses wg-), since every game shares one site.