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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?"
Civ games and, especially, Colonization (still among my favorite games ever) are effective teaching games because whenever you hit F1, you get a bit of historically-relevant fluff text as well as the help text. Most people will read it just out of curiosity.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."