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What do you think about educational learning games?

What are some examples of educational games done right?

  • The educational games I've seen usually either aren't really games, just "gamified" exercises (e.g., the game freezes until you solve a math problem), or else are interesting fun games, but you can get through them without really learning much about the target subject (e.g. http://www.testtubegames.com/velocityraptor.html, http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/. I think these games might have some educational value in that you could later talk about them and use them as a basis for intuition, but as stand-alones I don't think anyone will really learn much about relativity from them.) What are some games that are genuinely fun and engaging, have the target subject naturally incorporated into the gameplay, and still manage to teach the player a particular, non-trivial abstract idea? For example, one might imagine a puzzle game in which solving it is equivalent to matrix inversion, so that by the time you've mastered the game, you essentially understand Gauss-Jordan elimination. (Perhaps a decent real example is the Towers of Hanoi, as figuring it out is usually essentially equivalent to understanding recursion. Another is Rock-Paper-Scissors, which teaches the idea of non-transitivity.)

  • Answer:

    If it's done right, it doesn't seem like it's educational. This one is the only example I can think of right now because I just saw someone write answer involving it. Star Ocean: the Last Hope It's a cleverly disguised bible story, having a look at the great flood from a sci-fi perspective but at a casual glance looks like a run of the mill hero against the odds saga. If you're not thinking of just video games, there are a lot of games that, perhaps inadvertently, have an educational aspect. Card and dice games for example give you a basic grasp of probability and basic math, and darts are a great math exercise. Board games as well, Scrabble is an obvious example, giving you a chance to exercise your vocabulary and basic maths in one. Are they designed to be educational? Or is it just a fortuitous coincidence?

Brian Greenhow at Quora Visit the source

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My company has developed an application for teaching number sense to children in pre-K/K.  It's called "Native Numbers."  Here's the link to the description: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/native-numbers-complete-number/id570231808?mt=8 It was designed based on insights from brain and cognitive science to do exactly what you describe in your question - feel like a game but teach real math concepts to mastery.  Teachers tell us kids find it "addictive."  Here's one review by teachers who used it in the classroom, for example: http://teacherswithapps.com/app_reviews-native-numbers/ "We were wildly impressed with the progression of how and when new concepts are introduced. We loved witnessing the eureka moments when you could see light bulbs going off as the kids played away. I doubt the developers knew just how addicting the app would be. It is fast paced and repetitive and loads of fun!" The thing is, not only did we expect kids to find it that addictive - it was explicitly designed for that (though of course we couldn't know if we nailed it until it was tested with real kids). Although it's designed for elementary school students, many adults tell us they also feel the pull when they play it. Brian Greenhow said "if it's done right, it doesn't seem like it's educational." I'd argue that if it's done right it does look educational - but it doesn't necessarily look like a stereotypical game. In fact, I'd go further to point out that many games are fun exactly because they exploit circuits in the brain that exist to support learning, but without the learning payoff (basically the same way that junk food triggers brain circuits that evolved to acquire nutrition without delivering the nutrition payoff).  Many people who want to "make learning fun" seem to approach it by starting with a game and then trying to "layer on" the learning.  This has a name in the educational research community: it's called chocolate-covered broccoli.  The game is the chocolate and the educational content is the broccoli.  It's a bad recipe. But that's kind of ridiculous if you look at what's actually going on: you are exploiting a learning mechanism but stripping out the educational content to make a fun game, and then you are trying to layer back in the educational content.  It's clumsy at best.  It's better to go back to the root of the issue and just design the learning experience in a way that taps that circuit directly - it removes two layers of noise compared to the chocolate covered broccoli approach. I've written about this at greater length here: http://www.nativebrain.com/2012/06/do-we-need-to-gamify-learning-or-re-learnify-gaming/

Michael Connell

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