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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?"
Its possible to have fun, and be educational whilst disconnected from the real world. I give you Droid Works http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Droid_Works. I bought this game years ago, didn't even know it was educational, I just saw making your own droids and decided I must have it. I enjoyed the game too, its only recently when I found the box buried away somewhere did I see on the box that was an educational game. Teaches you about pulleys, weights, gears and thinking ahead. Im tempted to re-install it now...
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
I highly recommend "Mindrover." In this game, you build and program a little robot that goes through obstacle courses, fights other robots, etc. It's got an intuitive graphical programming language (though you can edit the files directly for a more advanced, hands-on approach). You get to program the robot's default behavior, define how it responds to threats, program "hunting" strategies, etc.
The main website appears to be down, but here's the community site with a demo for free download. If someone had given me this game when I was a kid, I'd definitely be a better programmer today.