I was putting together some simple procedural sketches for games to help kids learn to read, and while showing them to some colleagues we got onto the subject of poetry. Kids love rhymes, and poems have a kind of metrical structure to them, which might make them, in some ways, more useful for learning to read than straight prose.
Of course this is the central conceit behind Theodore Geisel’s Cat in the Hat and other Dr. Seuss stories. When I was a kid I remember thinking that those stories were far cooler in every way than boring old Fun with Dick and Jane.
Now I’m playing around with some ideas for a computer game where the goal would be to construct poems in various ways, such as by arranging objects on a screen. Playing such a game might also be a very nice way to study and practice a second language.