Education Games

secretkeeper12

New member
Jun 14, 2012
197
0
0
I love to play a good game that teaches me something in the process. Science, language, history, whatever it is, I find my imagination works wonders with a game that educates.

Developers seem to focus education games for a young audience, but I think their appeal is universal. As long as you know what it's trying to teach, I believe you will enjoy them!

What education games do you love?

Right now I play a game based on the carbon cycle. In brief, the carbon cycle shows how carbon dioxide flows in an ecosystem. It's multiplayer but not very popular...maybe you'd like to join me?

Play with the carbon cycle: https://www.brainpop.com/games/carboncyclegame/
 

maninahat

New member
Nov 8, 2007
4,397
0
0
All games are educational, in the sense that you have to learn what are often transferable skills to play them well. Games like Kerbal Space Program need you to understand astrophysics and rocket science to play (even if you don't learn any of the math behind it). Cities: Skylines teaches about balance sheets, city design, traffic flow and macroeconomics. Papers Please educates you on corruption and its causes. Moviebob once pointed out that even games like GTA teach you things like basic map reading, basic resource management.

I like the old Microsoft Dorling Kindersley stuff: they're not strictly speaking games, but interactive books with lots of things to explore and clickable stuff to keep you interested. Some have minigames too. See also, Encarta 95 and its Mindmaze. Google just did one aimed at teaching coding for children (just google it).

For more adult stuff, SPENT [http://playspent.org/html/] is one that teaches you about the causes of poverty. Then there's Depression Quest which educates you about the realities of depression and how it messes up your decision making.
 

secretkeeper12

New member
Jun 14, 2012
197
0
0
maninahat said:
For more adult stuff, SPENT [http://playspent.org/html/] is one that teaches you about the causes of poverty. Then there's Depression Quest which educates you about the realities of depression and how it messes up your decision making.
Wow, powerful game! Buying groceries for my home right now. I only wish I knew whether my home has a fridge or not!

Would you believe the Nobel Prize made a game? It's a simple one about matching blood types.

https://www.nobelprize.org/educational/medicine/bloodtypinggame/gamev2/index.html

All you need to play it is Adobe.
 

Neverhoodian

New member
Apr 2, 2008
3,832
0
0
Gotta go with a classic and say SimCity 2000. My elementary school used the game to introduce us to basic concepts of city management during computer lab, though most of us just ended up loading save files with prebuilt cities and spamming disasters. Honorary mention goes to Oregon Trail Deluxe, though again its intended use as a teaching tool kind of went over our heads. A common tactic was to load up the wagon with as many bullets as possible and just play the hunting minigame over and over, blasting everything that moved. No wonder the American bison almost died out if the original pioneers were even remotely trigger-happy as we were.