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What's In an Educational Game?
An anonymous reader writes "I work at a non-profit whose mandate is to increase science literacy and awareness. One of the methods that we've started exploring is in making free, online educational games. Our target demographic for the games is kids aged 8-12, but there is no reason the games could not also appeal to a broader age range. What would you look for in an educational game? Does length and depth of gameplay matter to you, or would you rather play a trivial game with subconscious educational value?"
Just to tack onto the above point, I agree overtly educational games are a waste of energy. Puzzles and resource management games, like Oregon Trail, have a much better chance at successfully completing your requirements.
I think an intellectual hero as the players avatar would be a nice touch. A Susan Calvin or Hari Seldon character that uses knowledge and wisdom (a Tom Swift without the natural genius) to solve problems. Instead of the absent minded professor and his beautiful-yet-intelligent-and-spunky daughter needing rescuing, have the scientist do the rescuing. Or better yet, have the absent minded professor's hard working apprentice do the rescuing. You know, a young man or woman that your target demographic can relate to.
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Age of Empires 2 was great for history. I didn't even hear the words "Holy Roman Empire" in class until World History at the end of high school, but I was already familiar with it from the missions and the history background info provided on the History tab. When you're 12 years old you have a lot of time and patience to play your favorite games over and over.
Even if you don't know the names and dates, it's still immensely useful to have a general idea of what happened. At Agincourt a few English archers were able to shoot down from a hilltop and defeated the French army who got stuck in mud in their heavy armor. I don't know anything else about it but it's more than most people know.
You can't help but learn from those kind of games. I haven't played Rise of Nations in 5 years but I still remember that the Terracotta Army was Chinese. I know what Angkor Wat and Versailles look like. These are all things that I first learned from that game.
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I've always thought that Darwin Pond was a cool piece of free (beer) software that could be used to teach evolution. It's a simulation game with swimming organisms that compete for food and mates. There's even assortative mating built in.
What's great about it is there's no fixed goal, it's completely up to the player--maybe you want to try to breed fast swimmers or cool moving swimmers. You can watch the abundance of types change through time, try out your own "designed" types or introduce random mutations into the population.
I would recommend games like this.
It kinda makes me wonder though if at that point it's really an educational game, or just a fun RTS that's just vaguely historically themed.
E.g., at Agincourt,
- it wasn't on a hill, it was on flat ground. The hill was at Crecy.
- it wasn't just archers. About 1/5 of the English army were dismounted knights functioning as a heavy pikemen in front of the archers. The hail of arrows and the mud were one factor, but without that wall of pikes the French heavy cavalry would have reached the archers and cut them down. With heavy losses, but they would have.
In effect, what really happened was more of a "the knights lost to combined arms" case than "the knights lost to archers."
- the terrain played a more massive part than just the mud. There also was the fact that it was flanked on both sides by heavy woods, which was as good as impenetrable during a battle. (Anyone trying to make their way through it, would have arrived the next day at best.) Which allowed the relatively small number of pikemen to form a phalanx 4 rows deep and still completely prevent access to the archers, as well as be immune to flanking. (When facing lots of cavalry, flanking is your #1 worry. That's what the cavalry is there for.)
Plus, it severely limited how many french could actually get into melee with the English. Even on foot and packed shoulder to shoulder, there seems to have been room for a little over 200 in a line. Which severely blunted the whole numbers advantage of the French. By contemporary French accounts, those in the third row of the attack wave already couldn't use their swords against the English.
Worse yet, the French ended up packed in a tight formation, which is the worst possible kind against missile fire.
On an open hilltop, the story would have been very different.
- the french heavy armour played a much lesser role in their delay. The heaviest armour (chain or plate alike) at the time was about 40 pounds, and it would be almost another 200 years before plate got to be 60 pounds. Compared to the weight of the human and the horse, that was peanuts.
The terrain there was freshly ploughed earth and literally soaked in water. Some people have actually drowned in that mud, which gives an idea of how liquid it was. Even without armour, marching through it would have been a pain.
On the whole, probably the armour still actually helped. Otherwise they'd be dead even sooner.
- it wasn't really "a few" archers. It was 5000 archers, raining a total of 1000 arrows per second upon the enemy. To give you a comparison, it's the equivalent of over a hundred M-60 machineguns on full auto, non-stop. It wasn't just missile fire, it was concentrated missile fire, the kind that would not be seen again until WW1.
Etc.
So basically did that game really teach you much history, or was it just a game? I just have to wonder.
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