Okay, this isn’t a piece of software, but it is a little gift from Google to us for the holidays.

Santa tracker is a minisite on Google complete with simple yet addictive games (still recovering from the rage of level 10 of Present Bounce), entertaining interactive animations, animated videos and insightful educational activities harnessing Google’s already successful tools such as YouTube, Translate and Maps. See if you can find a fairly hidden one near the top too!

Beneath the core buildings on the page, there lies an advent calender with a new activity being released each day – usually with a maximum number of levels and a score you can share to social media once you either lose or make it to the end. On the 24th night, as the name of the minisite suggests, Google will release their own tracker to help you see where Santa is travelling throughout the night (inevitably using Google Maps?)

All of the available activities make use of Basic HTML or HTML5 technology meaning you only need a modern web browser such as Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome/Chromium, Opera, Apple Safari or Microsoft Edge on a desktop or laptop/netbook to enjoy the experience. For Android users of course, there is an app available on Google Play too.

If you’d like to experience this for yourself, please click the link on the right to do so.

Have you played on it yet? What’s your highest score on the games so far? Have you learned anything new? Feel free to leave a comment down below.

One More Thing…

In addition to Santa Tracker, Google have also expanded their keyword easter egg vocabulary with something I stumbled upon when writing for yesterday’s Noodle & Bean post. Try typing “Christmas”, “Hannukah” or “Kwanzaa” into Google this December in a modern desktop browser. You might just get a nice surprise (it doesn’t seem to work with anything currently beyond that).

Apologies for the shortness of the post this week, but it was a choice of waiting too late to tell you more, or let you know whilst there’s still time to enjoy it.