Amazing service - NO LONGER EXISTS
This is going to be a long one, as I can tell that I'm the first to say it here; this is just a product I used to hold near and dear to my heart.
I am speaking from the perspective of a former student who used to use the service while it still existed. I cherished it. I even recommended it glowingly to others. That's why the following might sound a little scathing.
This website genuinely fostered my love for learning, but it hasn't really caught on yet that EducationCity as a platform has JUST BEEN DELETED. It's all gone! Years worth of branding and work, with charming characters I genuinely enjoyed to see, engaging gamified lessons I enjoyed learning from, and HUNDREDS OF HOURS OF GENUINELY GOOD CHILDREN'S CONTENT has literally just been thrown away and replaced with... a bland black and white landing page for an entirely different service? Every single deadlink redirects to the same homepage. There's no mention of Education City anywhere. It's like they're trying to leave it in the past.
That bright orange they used to don was so recognisable. It actually had personality. You could guess what it was at a glance, and that says something about the service. It was... fun. It was fun to use. I learnt all about internet safety, and I gained my love for computers while playing on their website. I spent countless hours on PlayLive, on that hexagonal Wordsearch mode, trying to beat my other classmates while COVID ticked past. Both teachers and students were able to easily create online exam papers, long before any other competitor adopted the same. It was literally my lifeline in those years. There was nothing wrong with the service. It literally WON MULTIPLE AWARDS. Maybe they could have marketed themselves more, maybe they could have added more features... but to strip back, and completely DELETE what they had made? It was a perfectly good product - and they've destroyed it at the one moment kids probably could have done with it the most. Kids don't really play educational games anymore, because most of them just aren't that high quality. But that orange grabbed people's attention. That small, orange icon. That vibrant orange wasn't dated, it had a purpose. It gave the brand their identity. When I first noticed the icon on my EducationCity shortcut had gone grayscale, I knew something had gone wrong.
The logo now is plain text, with a single randomly coloured stripe. The logo alone doesn't seem like it would remotely appeal to kids anymore, and it's all downhill from there. There's no personality in the logo - no, they have to spell out their brand's vision to you in plain text. If you weren't paying attention, you wouldn't even think the two were related. They even have the gall to advertise themselves as "Award-Winning Education" despite removing everything that won them those awards in the first place. Everything EducationCity had to offer is fully and truly gone. They shouldn't get to market themselves using a product they don't even want to associate themselves with anymore, but they have, and they currently ARE.
At a time where safe educational games on the Internet are scarcer yet scarcer, and social media gets more overloaded with kids that used to have alternatives, they've literally gutted their award-winning service in favour of - from what I can easily tell from their promotional images - an uninspired slab of a website. No kid would enjoy using Edmentum.com over Education City. The reviews for the new website seem to be echoing the same sentiment - although I can't speak on that, as I myself have not used Edmentum. But it's clear: Edmentum is not well made compared to EducationCity. Not only did they scrap something good in its favour, it's not even a good product in the eyes of its users.
People used to sing their praises, but now, it's obvious Edmentum only wants to sing for investors. Years worth of branding inexplicably destroyed, and for what? The users aren't happy, and the branding is forgettable. There is a literal gap in the market that Education City stood all alone in, and could have filled like they did years ago... but instead of delivering on their original goals, they chase in the name of "profit". It's just heartbreaking to look at.
Had this product still existed, I would have flocked back, but there's not even anything left of EducationCity that I could review. EducationCity no longer exists. The newer Edmentum.com has its own page, but this is a review of what's left of Education City. Which is just that: nothing. 0/5.
