Ever wanted to know what it's like to be a proton? Step right up and try this clever and entertaining educational puzzle game about physical chemistry. Find out more about cool things like lasers and fusion and how to make your own hydrogen atom! Learning doesn't get much more fun than this.
City of Immigrants is the fourth in the series of Mission US educational point-and-click adventure game titles focusing on American History, created by Electric Funstuff under the auspices of New York PBS Station Channel 13. The year is 1907. You are Lena Brodsky, a 14-year-old Jewish Immigrant from Russia, making her way in the city of New York in the land of opportunity, America. The exploration and newness of Lena's immigrant experience is a natural fit for a video game framework, and it makes for another wonderful installment of the series.
Master the art of coding with your trusty Hackpad in this ambitious puzzle game, free for Android! Design an AI robot, write games and share them with others, and even save the world in story mode.
Need a good brain work out? How about one you can take on the go with your iOS or Android? It's time to put your thinking caps on and start stretching out the only organ that named itself, because Brain Builder is here to, well, help you build your brain!
This incremental game features the very foundations of reality itself as your currency. Click to buy subatomic particles and generate atoms which you can use to spend on more and more complex forms of matter as you go. Protons and neutrons give way to blood cells and coffee beans. A fascinating educational game.
A theft at the iconic Smithsonian Castle winds up wrapping you up into a very timey-wimey adventure in this beautiful and puzzle-packed hidden-object adventure made in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institute, offering tons of educational factoids to boot!
A puzzle game about information and how it gets from point A to point Z. Click and drag to create shimmering strands of info that crisscross space, from transmitting circles to receiving squares. Bonus points for more efficient webs of connections.
An educational puzzle game that has you guiding your little proton with the mouse, avoiding obstacles and combining with particles and lasers for a variety of scientifically-accurate effects.
Twelve is happy living in the city of Dozenopolis until a great calamity destroys it and everything else. Together with Dot, a perky decimal point, she'll set out to make things right in this gorgeous and clever puzzle platformer for iOS.
This educational game has you rotating tiles to reflect streams of colored photons, trying to aim them towards the crystals at the end. Numerous obstacles block your path so you'll need every ounce of your intelligence if you want to succeed.
Ready to take a dive into the wild and woolly world of particle physics? In this clicktoy, you're the head of a research laboratory and you're looking to make your mark on the world! You'll start off with just yourself, but as you do new research and the grant money comes in, you'll be able to hire new staff, grow your laboratory, and make world-shattering discoveries! Hopefully not literally, because this equipment is expensive...
Learn math skills AND defend the world against the forces of darkness? What are we, Buffy? You'll need to type fast to tally sums to destroy the matching monster that lumbers in from a magical gate in this gorgeous and challenging game.
You know what's cool? Science. You know what's cooler? Science games that can help save people's lives. That's what NOVA and the team behind Foldit decided when they created the RNA VirtuaLab. First, you get to play the game and learn how RNA works, and then you get to build your own RNA strands and maybe see them created in an actual, real-life lab. In short, it's an engaging way to do science and be still alive, and maybe save the world.
Our favourite typing duo is back for more... with a deadly twist! Icarus Proudbottom and his owlkin friend Jerry are enjoying a lovely day of typing when a knock at the door changes everything. Planned as a series of short weekly installments, this first episode brings all the zany hilarity you've come to expect, with some arcade-style typing on top.
A Cheyenne Odyssey is the second in the series of Mission US educational point-and-click adventure game titles focusing on American History, created by Electric Funstuff under the auspices of New York PBS Station Channel 13. The year is 1866. You are Little Fox, a twelve-year old member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe. Over the next ten years, your traditional way of life will see many changes. But as the world changes, so does the Cheyenne. And so must you. Another excellent installment of the Mission US series, if hampered by a few too many talking-head conversations.
Type:Rider is a puzzle platform game as well as an interactive learning experience created by Cosmografik. Taking some visual cues from games like LIMBO, it casts you in the role of two twin orbs traveling through a shadowy world. With Type:Rider, though, those aren't just random shapes you're rolling over and collecting. They're typefaces, each taken from some of the most recognizable fonts throughout history. As you head through each level, you'll relive that journey one unlockable manuscript at a time. And you might actually learn something cool along the way!
Based on an a viral advertising campaign by Metro Trains Melbourne, Dumb Ways to Die is a gruesome but hilarious educational game where you've got to protect a crowd of unsuspecting victims from their prescribed fates. As the WarioWare-style minigames get faster and faster, you've got to pull the fork from the toaster without getting shocked or duck the jaws of a hungry bear. Dumb Ways to Die's minigames are bizarre and random, but silly and easily replayable as you try to reach a new high score.
1897. The country of Galicia has been wracked by conflict between opposing economic and ideological factions. They meet under one roof during an uneasy time of peace. As an avatar of death, you must take the life of one, and live with the consequences in Postmortem, an adventure game by Jakub Kasztalski. A serious text-heavy work, but those intruigued by intrigue should find it quite intriguing indeed.
Watch, learn, adapt... oh, and don't get blown up. Impulse is part physics puzzle, part arcade game, with obstacles modeled after Newton's Laws of Motion. Get the green ball to the portal by generating a pulse that moves anything around it... sounds simple, right? But when propulsion, gravity, positive and negative charges and more come into play, you'll find it's anything but.
Socrates Jones doesn't get why you'd care about philosophy if you don't have a long white robe and a longer beard, but a freak accident means he's about to learn more about it than he'd ever thought he needed... in fact, his life depends on it! An educational visual novel inspired by Phoenix Wright, Pro Philosopher will teach you how to debate intelligently and constructively, and keep you entertained along the way.
Get in the zone and get ready for a zoning challenge! Blocks & Lots is a nifty educational puzzle where you've got to reallocate the lots of the city of Solano Heights to make everyone happy. But the city's stakeholders aren't easy to please! Tulip wants more parks, but Everett wants more big apartments, and JT wants more manufacturing space. There might not be a way to please everyone, but the fun is in trying to craft solutions that gets you darned close.
Fred has gotten lost in the forest, and now, a dire wolf is chasing him. Fortunately, Fred's body is a complex system, prepared for both everyday survival and extraordinary circumstances. And you'll be learning how it works, in Code Fred: Survival Mode, a collection of educational action minigames from Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry and Helpful Strangers.
Welcome to the life of a teaching assistant (and/or editor)! The Grading Game by Mode of Expression is a beefed-up version of the arcade-style browser release First Person Tutor. It puts you in the unenviable role of a TA grading papers for a grumpy proffessor who wants his students to get the grade they deserve: a perfect F! Since you're a bit strapped for cash you have no choice but to capitulate, sifting through papers and marking every error you see with a big red pen.
Flight to Freedom is the second in the series of Mission US educational point-and-click adventure game titles focusing on American History, created by Electric Funstuff under the auspices of New York PBS Station Channel 13. The year is 1848. The tenuous balance that had been struck concerning the issue of slavery wavers in the face of a nation expanding by conquest and treaty. Living in these tumultuous times is Lucy, a 14 year old slave of Kentucky's King Plantation. Lucy must balance her wishes for freedom with the risk of recapture, but an incident on the farm will force the issue sooner than she'd ever thought. What can a slave do? An intelligent and thought-provoking game that should appeal to both its student audience, and anyone with a passing interest in history.
When one wakes up in a featureless white room, apparently at the whims of a malevolent steam-punk computer, the first instinct is to escape. But... why? What's your argument? Can you justify your actions? Such is the question posed by ir/rational Redux, a puzzle adventure game by Tom Jubert, of Penumbra story-telling fame. Propositional logic has never felt so intense!
The gophers are coming, the gophers are coming! In this vibrant, kid-friendly tower defense game designed to dust off the ol' graphing skills, you defend a carrot from waves of hungry gophers, who need to be fed until they burst into rainbows. Plot points on the graph to reveal your enemy's marching path, dig up valuable rubies, and place upgradeable towers to keep your carrot safe from the waves of starving critters.
Witherworth University Professor Nathaniel Paynuss believes that proof-reading is meant to be a weapon to get back at those snotty collegiate brats making fun of him on "The Face Book". In First Person Tutor, an "educational" arcade game developed by Big Blue Boo Labs for the 7 Day FPS Game Jam, you play the role of beleaguered TA to the evil professor, held captive by a huge pile of student debt. You have a stack of papers to mark, and a score of professorial grudges Paynuss would be happy to settle by GPA proxy. You know what you have to do. The unique premise of First Person Tutor should appeal many on the internet, but it's very polished for a Game Jam work. The dark satire of college politics should give it wider appeal.
To quote the intro of Fallen City, Channel 4 and Big Robot's educational puzzle/real-time strategy game: What is a city? It is a machine; a machine for living in. But all machines can break down. The inhabitants of Fallen City (Angries) have become distracted by their individual lives and dreams and have let the once gleaming metropolis fall into disrepair. Frustrated by their inability to live the lives of fame and fortune they were told could satisfy them, many of the Angries fell into boredom or rage... and the city sunk ever deeper into its gloom. But broken machines can be fixed, right?
Come along for the adventure with Pee Wee and Nits the dog as they travel through history to learn and get their friends out of trouble. Run and jump your way through Greece, Rome, Egypt and Great Britain to solve physics puzzle and learn a little from British sitcom star, Tony Robinson. The excellent voice over work, grainy sketch art style, and casual difficulty will draw anyone to this advergame who is looking for a quick distraction.
Proke, a word game developed by Peter Hastings, is all about vocabulary building... literally! The goal of it is to build a mighty tower to the heavens, and your only tools are quick thinking and linguistic fortitude. While racing the clock, type a word that has the designated prefix or suffix, or for extra height, both. The faster you type, the higher you'll build. Extra points can be scored for typing the letters that appear in Bonus Bubbles, or doing combos of words with same prefix/suffix. Proke is a light kind of game, but it's very addictive.
A fun, and slightly insightful, collection of arcade mini-games from the London Science Museum and Preloaded, Futurecade is flashy neon-drenched action that's just a little educational. The quartet of games includes Bacto-Lab, Robo-Lobster, and Cloud Control, Space Junker, and while each isn't particularly deep, they're sure to get you thinking.
Color has you test the accuracy of your perception of color as you learn about key concepts in the theory of color and design. Simply move your cursor about the large color wheel and click when you have matched the color of the timer inside, before time runs out. Later levels have you matching multiple colors at once, giving you the opportunity to learn about complementary, analogous, ternary, and quaternary colors, all in the context of the game.
"Winners Use Government Grants!" says the opening screen of Digiwoog Disaster, a new edutainment point and click adventure game. Well, we should be happy that Digiwoog and BoMToons were the winners picked by the US Department of Justice to help kids learn about mobile devices, since they've come up with something really cool. An unidentified flying object has crashed on Woogi World, and Dr. Wiggenstein knows that only Woog of action Jett Woogman has the smarts and skills to investigate. He gives Jett a brand-spanking new DigiWoog mobile device, chock full of helpful apps. And so Jett sets out to solve the mysterious mystery of the mysterious UFO... and maybe learn a little about mobile phone safety!
Do you think that art and science enhance each other? That's the basic premise in Wondermind, a set of four mini-games that are not only fun to play, but also serve to illustrate the fascinating ways our brains work. The mini-games are all of classic type: a card matching game, a pipe connecting game, a path drawing game, and a light angling game. The game is aimed at kids, but while adults might find it a bit easy, it's certainly beautiful enough to reel anyone in, and the facts taught about the mind are, well, yes, wondrous.
It's always intriguing when a game developer takes a technical, even mundane, activity and makes it into a competition. KernType, a unique puzzle game developed by Mark MacKay for edutainment site Method of Action, charges you with dragging the middle letters of a given word for a given font to make it aesthetically perfect. Your result will be compared against a professional typographer's, and you will be given a score based on how close you get to their solution. It's not a concept that survives multiple play-throughs, but it's quirky fun.
It's been a rough day. You finally made it to London with visions of super-wealth in your head. Then your backpack was stolen. But, as you stand flummoxed in the rain, someone in a car driving by take pity on you and offers to give you a lift to the police station. That said person turns out to be local millionaire Mr. C, whose ailing health has left him in search for a young successor to his empire can only be described as an incredibly convenient coincidence. Still, now opportunity knocks, and if you make some smart choices, you just make make it to the penthouse at 56 Sage Street. A fine financial simulation advergame from Barclays, BBH London and B-Reel that hopes to introduce teens to the world of financial literacy.
Edutainment!... Commence eye-rolling, people. For some reason many are skeptical of any game that claims to "make learning fun". Perhaps it is the feeling that, since most believe learning (if not necessarily schooling) to be naturally fun, any subject that has to be made fun must be really dry. That said, while Mission US: For Crown or Colony is unlikely to redeem the genre for everyone, the tale of a teenager coming of age in Colonial America makes for a solid adventure, whose gentle challenge is balanced by excellent production values and historical detail.
The world is in your hands in Red Redemption's sequel to 2007's Climate Challenge. Assume control of the newly formed GEO in this complex and challenging strategy simulation game that forces you to cope with the needs of not only the environment but the people who live in it in order to change the future, dealing with the issues afflicting each country throughout the world as you try to bring about change. Real science and research guides your decisions, and Fate of the World offers up a challenging, complex experience that might get you thinking in more ways than one.
When a seed meteors into the ground, it finds itself in hostile terrain. Nasty-looking plants sit nearby, easy to provoke by the slightest bit of resource gathering. Defend your plant from the invading species in this fun take on tower defence games. You might even learn a thing or two...
Ready for more buildings, contraptions, machines, and inventions? Crazy Machines: New from the Lab is another resurrected hit from German game developers FAKT Software. Featuring gameplay very similar to The Incredible Machine, Crazy Machines features over 100 new levels, each one more complex (and zany) as the last.
CellCraft, the part-strategy part-educational part-weird game of cell growth, is an ambitious title that aims not only to educate you, but to SAVE THE PLATYPUS HOMEWORLD.... seriously. Presented with keen detail and fascinating facts, it's an incredibly well made and even a little tricky title that could have you penning a Christmas card to your own enzymes and acids this year.
Have you ever wanted to breed yourself a colony of blobular lifeforms, only to be stymied by the terms of your lease or ridiculous laws against Thing importation? Well, now you can simulate the experience with Thingdom, a game and webtoy created for the London Science Museum by Preloaded, which manages to make learning about genetics fun. Move over, brown eyes and blue eyes; kids today are finding out how to breed for monostalks.
Resurrected from 2007 where it rested in relative obscurity, Crazy Machines: Inventor Training Camp is a follow-up to the original Crazy Machines game that features more Rube Goldberg-like physics puzzles. Use a variety of objects to assemble crafty "devices" that accomplish different tasks. The setup is something you might see in The Incredible Machine, though Crazy Machines streamlines the process with much simpler building mechanics, fewer pieces to fuss with, a better visual presentation, and more directed goals.
From the Discovery Channel comes a casually-oriented strategy game of tactics, battle, mining and exploration. The world's energy reserves have run out, but a new element called helium
Titanium Chef is a point-and-click adventure in which you play a lowly chef-bot who, along with his best friend Moxie (a floating pink ball of fur), escapes his humdrum job and ventures out to become the best chef-bot in the galaxy. Setting aside the education aspect, this is one amazing, fun point-and-click adventure with a snarky sense of humor.
Smokescreen is a new alternate reality game (ARG) from entertainment company Six To Start. Social networking, blogging, and chat lingo are all part of this game that takes on the task of warning players about the dangers of the Internet in a way that makes you feel like you're experiencing them first-hand.
Globetrotter is as simple as it gets. You're given a map and you're given a location, and you must click on where you think that location is on the map. Sure, this is easy if you're looking for New York, United States or London, England, but good luck with Tunis, Tunisia on your first go, and believe me, Australia can be trickier than you may think.
Not satisfied simply to have won second place in our last competition, game designer Lars Doucet has been busy reworking, researching, and refining his entry, the strategic defense game Super Energy Apocalypse. We are proud to announce that the full-fledged game has now been released!
Traces of Hope centers around 16-year-old Joseph; survivor of a vicious civil war in Uganda, he was wrenched from his family and forced to flee his home. Now, five years later, Joseph is on a dangerous quest to locate his mother. Can you guide Joseph through the perils of a war-torn civilization to maybe, just maybe, locate the Red Cross messenger who can provide the information he so desperately desires?
Released in 2005 by German game developers FAKT Software, Crazy Machines was a cult classic that only recently began to breach the barrier to "fan-favorite" status among casual gamers. Publicized mainly by word of mouth, this out-of-the-ordinary puzzle game staked its claim as the next-generation leap from The Incredible Machine, which reached its height of popularity almost a decade earlier. The common theme in both games is the use of Rube Goldberg-inspired machines and contraptions to solve a puzzle or obstacle in each level.
dRive is quite possibly the first calculus-themed game to get a review on this site, but don't go fleeing for the high country quite yet; you don't need to understand the math to play the game. At its core, dRive is a simple "catch the falling objects" game, but the unusual, calculus-based method of controlling three games at once turns dRive into an innovative, fascinating game.
Step into another surreal world created by Amanita Design (Samorost). With eight totally separate environments, Questionaut feels like a cohesive whole. It's like stepping into a story book and becoming one of its characters. And thanks to Questionaut's powerful imagery, it feels like a living universe that continues to exist even after you've shut down your browser. Just delightful.
ElectroCity is fun little Flash game intended "to spark an interest and lay an unbiased foundation for later learning" about the issues involved in power generation, cost, and environmental impact. It is obviously a very simplistic look at those issues, intended to give a broad overview and invite further research on the part of the player. It's also not a bad little town sim game to boot.
Geosense is a multiplayer geography game, created using DHTML and Ajax, that can also be played alone. The game itself is all about location and consists of 10 or 20 rounds, each of which involves clicking on the map where you think the given city is located. You receive points for speed and accuracy, although the latter is given more weight. Be careful, you just may learn something.
Despite being short, uncomplicated and an absolute breeze for anyone already familiar with the world of letters, Orgdot's beautiful illustrations and animation make The ABC Game a must-see.
Galactor is a Flash-based point-and-click room exploration game from the Finnish Consumer Agency. Aimed at increasing awareness of consumer issues, Galactor's meticulous style and dry humor transcends the stigma often associated with educational entertainment. While the information within may not necessarily be accurate in regards to consumer protection laws outside of Finland, the game still contains a wealth of good advice and common sense.
This pair of Flash games, hosted on Nobelprize.org, teaches you about the physics of liquid crystals while playing.
Crystallite is an action puzzle game, similar to Tetris, where you position the falling blocks by rotating them before fitting them in their place. Use the right and left arrow keys to position the blocks, and the up and down arrows ...
An estimable goal from Atlanta-based company A Broader View, has inspired this Flash game with a global perspective: help the United States improve its disappointing knowledge of geography by challenging it to participate with the rest of the world in a geographical testing game, the Geography Olympics. The game asks you first to select the countr...
Here's a Flash game about gene sequencing from the UK which is surprisingly fun to play. The controls took me a couple of games to get used to, then I caught on to it quickly. It's all about constructing genes by piecing amino acids together in the proper sequence. A very odd premise on which to build a game, but it works quite well actually. Be ...
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