At this point, it should be apparent to most people that videogames can prove quite the formidable learning tool. The person who still thinks games are nothing but pointless timesinks for children to waste away their lives on are wr– well, they’re mostly wrong, at least. A good learning game can help you kill time while picking up a neat skill along the way, something which the guys at APP-arise seem to know quite well because their new game, Nerdtris, allows players to do just that.

For those of you not clever to pick it up right off of the bat, the word Nerdtris is a portmanteau of “Nerd” and “Tetris” which should provide some hint of the game’s objective. Players are presented with a seven-by-seven grid of blocks, each of which is given a value of 1 or 0. Get it yet? Nerdtris aims to teach players Tetris during their time with the game, a basic computer language consisting of 1’s and 0’s which, in certain combinations, represent other numbers. The point of all of this setup is for players to chain together combinations of 1’s and 0’s within the grid in order to match a value in a readout at the top of the screen. By now you should be asking, “what if I don’t know binary?” although it is very possible that I am the only one here who doesn’t. The answer is simple, if you do not know binary then a tooltip under the number in said readout will tell you the appropriate binary combination you should be searching for. A couple of hours into the game, I found myself getting quicker on the draw with each readout, dare I say I was learning?

Whether you want to learn binary or not, Nerdtris is a hoot for killing time. The game is currently available on the App Store for $1.99 for all iOS devices.

For more information about this and other APP-Arise projects, check out their main website.