While I think the sims and other "toys" are better than games for what you are trying to do, I think a "tool" would be even better still.
I'm thinking of a 3D rendering/modeling/animation program, such as trueSpace 3D. It's easy to start fiddling with without reading instructions, has built-in tutorials to teach the use of the fancier features, lets people create photo-realistic scenes or animations fairly simply, but scales up to TV-quality stuff too. It can be used by just about anyone, but there are many obvious "hooks" to use to branch off into physics (it has real world physics, such as gravity and collisions, in the animation section so things behave realistically), there's a lot of math involved in the NURBS, Splines, boolean object functions, and most other aspects of the software, though you don't *have* to know it to make nice images...it just helps you understand what's going on.
As a "grabber" to get attention and teach planning, concentration, and stick-with-it, it's useful, but add in the branching off to math, cinematorgraphy, physics, art, story-telling and lots of other things, and I think you can't beat it.
There are public-domain and freeware programs, such as PovRay, which do some of the same things at little or no cost, but trueSpace is really a good program for beginners...like I was when I started using it. It's not cheap, but perhaps, given your use and environment, Caligari might agree to donate a few copies? Might be worth asking anyway. http://www.caligari.com/ should get you contact info and more description of what the program can do.
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While I think the sims and other "toys" are better than games for what you are trying to do, I think a "tool" would be even better still. I'm thinking of a 3D rendering/modeling/animation program, such as trueSpace 3D. It's easy to start fiddling with without reading instructions, has built-in tutorials to teach the use of the fancier features, lets people create photo-realistic scenes or animations fairly simply, but scales up to TV-quality stuff too. It can be used by just about anyone, but there are many obvious "hooks" to use to branch off into physics (it has real world physics, such as gravity and collisions, in the animation section so things behave realistically), there's a lot of math involved in the NURBS, Splines, boolean object functions, and most other aspects of the software, though you don't *have* to know it to make nice images...it just helps you understand what's going on. As a "grabber" to get attention and teach planning, concentration, and stick-with-it, it's useful, but add in the branching off to math, cinematorgraphy, physics, art, story-telling and lots of other things, and I think you can't beat it. There are public-domain and freeware programs, such as PovRay, which do some of the same things at little or no cost, but trueSpace is really a good program for beginners...like I was when I started using it. It's not cheap, but perhaps, given your use and environment, Caligari might agree to donate a few copies? Might be worth asking anyway. http://www.caligari.com/ should get you contact info and more description of what the program can do.