Games

Pre-school here means Balvatika. Under the NCERT National Curriculum Framework for the Foundational Stage (2022), ages 3 to 8 form one stage — three pre-school years plus Classes 1 and 2 — and the pre-school goal is stated as emergent literacy and numeracy, not reading and arithmetic. So the pre-school games never ask a child to read a word or work out a sum. They ask them to listen and point.

The Class 1 games follow the current NCERT books: Sarangi for Hindi, Mridang for English and Joyful Mathematics, which replaced Math-Magic. Each game names the chapter it maps to.

CBSE lists four more Class 1 subjects — EVS, General Knowledge, Art & Craft and Health & Physical Education— but sets no textbook for any of them. They are delivered through school-level planning, and one GK publisher says so outright: “there is no specific book or syllabus.” So those four games are mapped to the topic lists schools actually use and to the NCF Foundational Stage goals, and they name no chapter, because there is no chapter to name. Only the three book subjects get chapter references here.

One thing worth being straight about: “A for Apple” and “अ से अनार” are alphabet-chart teaching, which is real classroom and home practice — but Mridang itself treats English as a second language and leads with speaking and listening, and Sarangi leads with stories rather than a varnamala drill. The games cover the chart work because that is what most parents want to practise at home. Where a game maps to a book chapter we say which one; where it doesn't, we say that too.

The school games speak using the voice already built into your browser or phone. There is nothing to install and no account.

The rhymes are different: the tune is real, played note by note, with each word lighting up in time with it. The words themselves are spoken, not sung — browser speech cannot sing, and recorded singing would have meant licensing, which rules out most of the popular Hindi rhymes because they are copyrighted film songs. Every rhyme shows where its words came from: public domain, traditional folk, or written by us.

Being precise about one thing: some browsers synthesise speech on-device and some send the text to the browser maker's own service to do it. We ask for an on-device voice first wherever one exists. What gets sent, if anything, is a single curriculum word — “apple”, “अनार” — and never anything about your child. If your device has no voice for a language, the speaker icon just won't appear and the games carry on working from their pictures.

These games collect nothing about your child. There is no sign-up, no account, no name, no age and no email, no advertising, and no score kept across sessions.

We do count page views, so we can see which games are actually used. That counting is done by Vercel Web Analytics: it sets no cookie and stores no identifier, so one page view cannot be linked to another or to a person. We see totals per page — never a journey, a profile, or anything about who you are.

Your child's language and sound preferences are saved only in your own browser and are never sent to us.

India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 treats everyone under 18 as a child and prohibits tracking, behavioural monitoring, profiling and targeted advertising directed at children — even with a parent's consent. Counting anonymous page totals is none of those things, and we have kept it that way deliberately: no cookies, no identifiers, nothing that could follow a child between pages. The other data flow we don't fully control is your browser's own text-to-speech, described above.

A 2013 review for the UK's Money Advice Service by Whitebread and Bingham at the University of Cambridge found that the foundations of adult money behaviour — self-control, planning ahead, delaying a reward — are largely formed by around age seven. That's the window these games aim at.

The “Be Patient” game is inspired by the well-known marshmallow experiments, but we want to be straight with you: later research has challenged how much those results really predict. A 2018 replication found roughly half the original effect, and much less again once family background and home environment were accounted for. Waiting is a useful habit worth practising. It is not a test of your child, and this game doesn't score them.

Counting rupees maps to the “Money” chapter in NCERT Class 1 Maths. India's formal school financial-literacy curriculum (CBSE with NPCI) starts at Class 6, so the 5–6 age group sits below it — which is part of why we built this.

For more, the Reserve Bank of India publishes free financial-education material for schoolchildren in 13 languages, and SEBI publishes “Financial Education for School Children”.