Brain Snacks · חטיפים למוח

פחות גלילה, יותר גדילה. Less scrolling, more growing.

Brain Snacks is a small, growing collection of learning games and interactive lessons for kids: short, hands-on, and built to actually teach something, as an alternative to games that just eat time. Everything runs in the browser, in Hebrew first, with no accounts, ads or tracking.

Play it: https://brainsnacks.pages.dev

What's inside

	Name	Ages	Language	What you learn	Docs
🎮 Game	Rotem's Sky Letters	4–7	עברית + English	Reading aloud: English syllables (BA, DE…) and Hebrew words with nikud	docs
🎮 Game	דגי המספרים · Number Fish	4–7	עברית	Numbers to 20, counting, adding and subtracting within 10	docs
🧪 Lesson	מעבדת הנייר המעופף · The Flying Paper Lab	8–12	עברית	Air pressure, Bernoulli, lift and drag, fair experiments	docs
🧪 Lesson	מעבדת הצליל · The Sound Lab	9–13	עברית	Waves, frequency, inverse proportion, musical ratios, speed of sound	docs
🧪 Lesson	כמה ארוכה שנה? · How Long Is a Year?	10–14	עברית	The solar year vs. the lunar month; leap years in the Gregorian, Hebrew and Islamic calendars, calculated by hand	docs

The same list, machine-readable, is in site/catalog.json (ages, languages, skills, microphone use). Keep it in step with the catalogue page.

What makes a Brain Snack

• One skill, really practised. A game drills one thing (reading aloud); a lesson explains one idea end to end (why planes fly).
• Hands-on. Lessons pair a real experiment at home (paper, straws, glasses of water) with an interactive simulator, and ask for a prediction before every experiment.
• Rewarding, not addictive. Stars, levels, badges and certificates, but sessions are short and the rewards are earned by learning.
• Kind to mistakes. Unclear answers are retried, not punished; real mistakes cost a little and teach something (the bird says the sound; the lesson explains the surprise).
• Its own look. Every game and lesson has a design of its own: the Flying Paper Lab is a paper lab notebook, the Sound Lab is a recording studio at night, How Long Is a Year? is an observatory: parchment pages under a night sky.
• Private by default. No logins, no ads, no analytics. Progress is saved only in the player's browser. Speech is recognised on the device (Whisper in the browser); Chrome's built-in speech service also runs in the game, and that one sends audio to Google.
• Tagged by age, so the catalogue can filter by it.

Repository layout

site/                                   published as-is to Cloudflare Pages (no build step)
  index.html                            the catalogue page (Hebrew, right to left)
  catalog.json                          the list of games and lessons, machine-readable
  games/rotem-sky/index.html            Rotem's Sky Letters (one self-contained file)
  games/number-fish/index.html          Number Fish
  lessons/flying-paper-lab/index.html   The Flying Paper Lab
  lessons/sound-lab/index.html          The Sound Lab
  lessons/calendars/index.html          How Long Is a Year?
  favicon.svg, favicon.ico, …           the Brain Snacks icon
  _redirects                            keeps old addresses working
docs/
  games/   lessons/                     how each game or lesson works, and why
tools/
  play-local.command                    double-click to run the site locally in Chrome
  voice-lines.json, generate-voice.mjs  every spoken line, and the script that records them
  deploy-local.sh                       publish by hand (personal account only)
  testclips/                            recorded syllables and words for testing speech recognition
.github/workflows/deploy.yml            publishes site/ on every push to main
wrangler.toml                           Cloudflare Pages project settings

Each game and lesson is a single static page in its own folder: plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, no framework and no build. They never share state, so one can't break another. Shared code (fonts, sounds, a speech helper) can move into site/shared/ once two items need it.

Adding a game or lesson

1. Create site/games/<id>/index.html or site/lessons/<id>/index.html.
2. Give it the link back to the catalogue, worded and placed the same everywhere: → כל המשחקים והשיעורים, linking to ../../, at the top right. Add the icon links (../../favicon.svg).
3. Add a card on the right shelf of site/index.html (copy an existing card), with data-age-min / data-age-max and a matching גילאי X–Y tag.
4. Add an entry to site/catalog.json, and a short doc in docs/games/ or docs/lessons/.
5. Push to main. It's live about a minute later.

Voice

Games never use the browser's own speech voice. Every line a game says is written in tools/voice-lines.json and recorded once into mp3 files with a good Hebrew voice:

node tools/generate-voice.mjs

The clips are recorded with Cartesia (model sonic-3, Hebrew voice Ayala). Put CARTESIA_API_KEY=... (or ELEVENLABS_API_KEY=...) in the git-ignored .env.local; the key is only used on your computer to record, never by the site. VOICE_ID picks another voice; VOICE_PROVIDER=edge uses Microsoft's free neural voices through edge-tts instead. Only new or changed lines are generated (FORCE=1 redoes all); commit the files it writes under site/games/<game>/voice/.

Running locally

Double-click tools/play-local.command. It serves the repo on http://localhost:8799 and opens Rotem's game in Chrome (the catalogue is at http://localhost:8799/site/). Chrome remembers the microphone permission for localhost.

While it runs, whatever the game hears is written to heard.log at the repo root. That log is how the speech recognition was tuned to a real child's voice; it is git-ignored, because it holds a child's speech.

Deploying

Every push to main publishes site/ to the personal Cloudflare account (c3a723351b598ee5ab014b6f5514b8aa, Pages project brainsnacks) through .github/workflows/deploy.yml. It needs one repository secret, CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN: a token from that account with Account → Cloudflare Pages → Edit.

Don't use wrangler login for this project: wrangler keeps one login for the whole computer, and this computer is also used with a work Cloudflare account. To publish by hand, put the personal token in a git-ignored .env.local (CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN=...) and run tools/deploy-local.sh, which pins the personal account ID.