Re: [pygame] Philosophy of Educational Games

[Atul Varma <varmaa@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dan,

I've been interested in educational games for a while too, and most of
my favorite games have been educational in some way, even if they
weren't intended as such (those are usually the best ones).  Here's a
few scattered thoughts, if it helps at all.

I like both your ideas for educational games.  The chemistry one
reminds me of an old game I played when I was a kid called "Chem Lab",
which I haven't been able to find any trace of on abandonware sites. 
You basically had a chemistry lab with any chemicals and equipment you
need at your disposal; the game had missions in the form of labs where
you'd have to, for instance, create nitroglycerin for some reason or
another.  I believe there may have been labs in which you had to
identify a "mystery substance", too.  It'd be great to see something
along those lines.

Like that game, all of my favorite educational games have centered
around exploration and experimentation in which, as you mentioned, the
gameplay and education work with each other instead of against one
another.

Some other games you might want to look to for inspiration or ideas:

  Alter Ego
  http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?gameid=44

  This is one of the most original and fun games I've ever played.  It
sort of defies categorization, but one way to describe it might be "an
educational version of The Sims or Fable."  It was made in the early
1980's, and sometimes I think it'd be neat to see a remake, but I'm
not sure if advanced multimedia technologies and faster processors
could make this game much better.

  Hidden Agenda
  http://www.toolness.com/tool/tool.php3?section=interactive#ha

  The best game about politics that I've ever played, and one of my
favorite games period.  The link above goes to a review I wrote on my
homepage, so I won't describe it here.  I believe a Star Trek game was
made on a similar model as this one; it'd be interesting to see more
games use this kind of gameplay style, and it's unfortunate that the
game mechanics were never imitated/built upon to a greater degree.

  Mind Rover
  http://www.mindrover.com/
  Robot Odyssey
  http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=916

  Games that teach programming or logic are lots of fun, and Mind
Rover and Robot Odyssey are some of the best.  A game that teaches you
programming by making you program a "virtual robot" in Python could be
very cool, and a lot of fun from an implementation standpoint too.

Finally, I'd suggest checking out The Education Hall of Belated Fame
at The Home of the Underdogs, if you haven't already seen it:

  http://www.the-underdogs.org/featured.php?id=Education

Hope this helps!

- Atul

On 4/25/05, Dan <dan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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"
> 
>