The Travel of Wiglington & Wenks

The Travels of Wiglington and Wenks is a virtual world based on the children’s story book series by John Bittleston. Through the web-based game, children ages 7 to 14 travel to places around the world, meet different historical people, play games, interact with other children online. This virtual world has more than 100 real and imaginary locations to help children learn about various cultures, people, and important historical events.

The site is intended to be a safe place for kids to play and explore:

Parents can look forward to a safe site for their children where they will be learning about history, geography, landmarks, famous people, inventions, the environment, animals and more.

{from the Wiglinton & Wenks website}

My Thoughts

When I first had the opportunity to review Wiglington & Wenks, I was excited. The graphics were amazing {and cute} and since we are doing geography studies this year I thought it would be a great addition to our school time.

The girls wanted to play right away ~ and really I couldn’t blame them. However, they quickly became frustrated trying to figure out how to access the program and got to the point where they just wanted to do something else. I tried to figure out how to start traveling in the game and ended up having to search through some forums for in order to gain full access. 

Truthfully, it’s not a program that I would want to invest my money in. While it does offer some fun things for kids to do, I had a few concerns:

• Lack of explanation on how to begin. While the site tells you to go to the museum, there are no directions on how to GET there. I ended up finding the museum for the kids, but was getting pretty frustrated myself. You are then supposed to find key items to help various historical figures remember things…again, good luck with that. The girls were just wandering around and not doing much in the way of learning.
• The site offers chat features between players ~ while it is moderated, some kids know how to get around the ‘no profanity’ rule and will use use inappropriate words. You can report various players if you witness something inappropriate {which I did..but couldn’t figure out how to report it}. That said, I’m not comfortable letting my kids explore a site that isn’t as controlled and monitored as I would desire it to be. The company is updating their chat monitoring software, but at the time I am writing this review, it is not done.
• Basically, the game ended up being a huge time-sucker and since we don’t allow the kids a whole lot of computer time, it’s not educational-based enough for me to justify a paying for a membership.

Find Out More

Anyone can play Wiglington & Wenks, but if you would like access to special features {like we did}, you’ll have to subscribe. There are several different options for membership: Monthly {$5.99}, 3 Month Ticket {$16.99}, 6 Month Ticket {$29.99} and Yearly {$48.00 ~ currently 20% off}. For more information, visit their site.