Eracade for classrooms

Who it is for, and how to use it in class

Eracade is a general-audience site for people aged 13 and over, and it is not directed to children under 13. The Children and Families page gives the full position, including the higher age that applies in some countries.

In a classroom, the simplest way to use it is also the safest: play without accounts. Every game, the daily challenge, the museum, its tours and its worksheets work with no sign-up. Nothing about a pupil is stored beyond three-letter initials beside a score they choose to submit, and a salted network hash that is deleted within 48 hours. Settings and stamps stay in the browser on that device.

Accounts are optional and are only open to people aged 16 or over in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, and 13 or over elsewhere; please do not ask pupils below those ages to create one. The optional Player 1 Pass is for adults, and a teen can only buy it with a parent or guardian. Neither is needed for anything on this page. For which websites pupils use themselves, follow your school’s own policy.

What Eracade does not have

• No ads. Eracade runs no advertising and no ad scripts. If that ever changes, the privacy policy will be updated before it happens.
• No sign-up to play. Every game, the daily challenge, the leaderboards and the Passport work without an account. Accounts are optional, use a passkey or an emailed link rather than a password, and are only open to people aged 16 or over in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, and 13 or over elsewhere.
• No chat or messaging. There is no chat, no user-to-user messages, no comments and no friend lists. Avatars are picked from preset pictures, and nothing can be uploaded.
• No trackers. There are no third-party analytics, no tracking or fingerprinting scripts and no third-party scripts of any kind. We keep our own anonymous counts of pages opened and games played, with no cookie, no stored identifier and no IP address, and nothing is counted if the browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control.
• Nothing to buy that changes a game. Every game is free. The optional Player 1 Pass never unlocks a game or gives anyone an advantage on a leaderboard.

What the site stores

High scores, the three-letter initials entered beside them, settings such as sound and calm mode, and Passport stamps are kept in the browser’s own local storage on that device. They are not sent to us unless a player chooses to submit a score to a leaderboard. Clearing the site’s data in the browser removes them, and we cannot restore them. The cookies and storage page lists every item.

Eracade sets no cookies unless someone signs in to an optional account, and then only one session cookie. Like any website, the site is delivered through a hosting network, Cloudflare, which processes ordinary request data such as IP addresses to deliver and protect it.

Leaderboards and initials

Nothing about a run leaves the browser unless the player presses Submit. A submitted score carries three letters, from A to Z, which are checked against a list of offensive combinations both in the browser and on our server. Initials, score, rank and date then appear on a public board. Anyone can use the Report link beside a row.

We never store an IP address. For abuse prevention we keep a salted hash of the network address for no more than 48 hours. A player can delete their own score with the receipt kept in their Passport. The privacy policy asks players not to use letters that identify them if they would rather not, and in a classroom it is worth agreeing on made-up initials before anyone submits.

Motion and comfort

Some games flash or shake. Every game has a calm mode in its pause menu that removes flashes and screen shake. The museum’s exhibits start still when a device asks for reduced motion, make no sound until a button is pressed, and nothing in them flashes more than three times a second.

Using the museum in a lesson

• Tours: a ten-minute route, every hall in thirty minutes, and a forty-five-minute route for a single lesson built around one idea, that limits shape design.
• Worksheets: one printable page per hall, with five questions answerable from the hall’s text, a look-closely task and a make-your-own task. Answer pointers sit under each sheet on screen.
• Glossary: the words the halls use, each in one short paragraph, searchable.
• How we made it: ten notes on how a game was designed, useful for any lesson that asks pupils to design something under a constraint.
• The timeline and the colophon, which shows where the facts come from and how to send a correction.

Museum stamps are saved in the browser only and do not need an account.