[pygame] Philosophy of Educational Games

[Dan <dan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm interested in your input on how to design better educational games.

Many educational games are based on having the user answer questions to
gain power-ups, etc. This is artificial: the educational part and the
fun part are clearly separate. What about an educational game where
knowledge was as central to the game as good shooting? Users seem to
enjoy learning how to defeat the different monsters in a game; why can't
it be just as much fun to learn something educational?

When I was a child our school had a game called Number Munchers, in
which you had to eat only numbers that matched a certain criteria (e.g.,
prime numbers, fractions in lowest terms) while avoiding enemies. This
game was simple but popular. The game was later expanded to include
eating other things, such as chemical elements.

I've come up with two possibilities for educational games. The first is
a standard 2D game in which there happen to be a lot of chemicals lying
around. You throw one chemical onto another to get the desired result,
such as blowing up an enemy. The chemical reactions would mimic the real
world (that's the educational part). Part of the challenge might be to
identify the chemicals: for example, since many chemicals simply look
like white powder, you throw a little acid on it to see if it reacts
like a base. This would be a good reason to include non-explosive
reactions.

Another possibility is a game in which you choose various historical
figures to accomplish some kind of goal. For example, Marx speaks well,
but he get sidetracked all the time trying to liberate employees. This
introduces a lot of technical difficulties because computer games are
notoriously bad at handling dialogue.

So if you have any ideas or suggestions or musings, I'd be interested to
hear them.

By the way, the only educational game on the PyGame web site is Tux Math
Scrabble.

-- 
 The first time the [artificially intelligent] creature was put down
 in the game world, he just stared at his feet. I was puzzled, but
 after debugging found that the creature was trying to eat himself.
 He was hungry, and had spotted himself as a nearby convenient object!
     - Richard Evans, creator of the AI game "Black & White"