Excellent. This is one of a very rare breed of games that attempts to encourage academic familiarity without ending up with extremely shallow mechanics that are more or less independent of the core topic.
My heuristic for evaluating a game for educational value is
"Is mastery of and success in the game directly proportional to understanding and comfort with the core academic proposition of the game."
This game scores brilliantly there. I hope educators learn to recognize the power of engagement in learning, and cultivate a sense of evaluating effective learning games.
I could not have given a better description of my central design principle for educational games. It's amazing how many people think that it's just a matter of wrapping some arbitrary incentive structure around a worksheet.
Comments
Excellent. This is one of a very rare breed of games that attempts to encourage academic familiarity without ending up with extremely shallow mechanics that are more or less independent of the core topic.
My heuristic for evaluating a game for educational value is
"Is mastery of and success in the game directly proportional to understanding and comfort with the core academic proposition of the game."
This game scores brilliantly there. I hope educators learn to recognize the power of engagement in learning, and cultivate a sense of evaluating effective learning games.
I could not have given a better description of my central design principle for educational games. It's amazing how many people think that it's just a matter of wrapping some arbitrary incentive structure around a worksheet.