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Are there educational games for adults?

Started by March 05, 2019 03:29 AM
10 comments, last by Lendrigan Games 5 years, 8 months ago

Does anyone know of any good educational games for adults?  It seems like almost all educational games I could find are targeted to kids.

I have been working on a game where the basic premise is:

  • Answer trivia questions (history, science, etc)
  • Earn in-game virtual gold for correctly answering questions
  • Use the gold to purchase/upgrade various aspects of your civilization
  • Progress through subject matter and learn a subject in history, while building your civilization

It's basically a highly simplified cross between Civilization and Clash of Clans, but your ability to correctly answer questions is what drives the progress in the game.

Wikipedia lists about 10 games under educational games for adults.  That's a pretty small number of games.  And I have looked at various apps such as TriviaCrack, that's not exactly the type of thing I'm going for.

The only game I've been able to find that even comes close is DuoLingo, which seems to have a similar vision in that it's a "game" but, unlike something like Clash of Clans, you actually walk away from it with something worthwhile (knowledge of a new language).

So does anyone know of, or have played, educational games that are targeted to adults?

I don't know how many educational games are out there for adults but we have been working on something like that for quite some time now.

It's intended towards generating basic awareness about medical field to non-medical people and to counter the number of casualties caused due to medical errors while the student is in learning stage. 

This was also showcased and appreciated in Joint Conference on Serious Games, Spain in 2018. 

 

https://www.themedlife.com

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There's Slime Forest Adventure and its copyright-and-trademark-infringing cousin Knuckles in China Land.

jsclev1, have you checked out the games on gamesforchange.org

-- Tom Sloper -- sloperama.com

You know, I knew pretty much nothing about pre-XXth century history except some vague notions about the Roman empire.  Then, in my mid 50's, I started playing Paradox's grand strategy games with my son.  Now, I have a deep understanding of feudal Europe from the fall of the Roman empire until the rise of Napoleon. know the difference between agnatic-cognatic primogeniture and elective succession (and who in Europe used which) and can even appreciate how the Hapsburg inbreeding program lead directly to the Spanish War of Succession and how that resulted in the political structure of the modern-day low countries.

So, are you looking for "education games" or "games that are educational" because I think they;re two different things ("you're going to learn something now! click here" vs. "click here! Dis goin' be gud! Try using the iqba system of governance today!")

Stephen M. Webb
Professional Free Software Developer

DrSKP, https://www.themedlife.com looks very interesting.  That is the type of thing I've been looking for: an educational game, but aimed at adults (or at least older students) rather than children.

Tom Sloper, Games for Change does look like a good resource for information about this sort of thing.  I had stumbled onto that through Google searches.

 Bregma, that's interesting that you learned a lot of European history through Paradox's games.  I had a hard time finding truly educational games through Google searches because a search phrase like "educational games for adults" will bring up pages talking about how Civilization and Age of Empires are educational.  I have played a lot of Civilization and Age of Empires, but it's a real stretch to call those games "educational".  I haven't played Paradox's games, though, so that is interesting that you, even inadvertently, gained such a deep understanding of European history.

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6 hours ago, jsclev1 said:

I have played a lot of Civilization and Age of Empires, but it's a real stretch to call those games "educational"

Why not? Age of Empires had real encyclopedia-like articles in mission briefings. And even without that, just the fact that the campaigns or gameplay elements are based on historical events are enough to teach players, especially if they didn't know anything about the period before.

Even outside of history, you have games like Kerbal Space Program that teaches players rocket science, flight simulators that teach both the theory of flying and the controls of the specific aircraft (all simulators do that kind of thing), playing Dwarf Fortress (or even Minecraft) exposes you to geology and different minerals/rock types, city builders such as Cities Skylines may make you learn a thing or two about urban planning and traffic management, and so on. None of this is the traditional kind of education (well, except flight simulators, they will throw in real-world airplane manuals and call it a day :) ) and none of those games will make you take tests or answer questions or whatever, but they expose players to knowledge in the field in an intuitive and fun way. That is one great advantage that an interactive medium such as video games have over traditional education. That is something that needs to be taken advantage of, instead of regressing to gamified classrooms, which seems to be your original idea.

I don't know, if Screeps can be considered an educational game.

But if you want to learn programming and problem solving in general, you should definitely check it out :)

Hi, we are working on a game for professional education( accounting) and I have similar ideas about this kind of game. Do you mind having a chat about this? which communicating tool are you using? 

On 3/7/2019 at 6:54 AM, 1024 said:

Why not? Age of Empires had real encyclopedia-like articles in mission briefings. And even without that, just the fact that the campaigns or gameplay elements are based on historical events are enough to teach players, especially if they didn't know anything about the period before.

Good point!  I had forgotten about those encyclopedia-like articles in Age of Empires.  Civilization has that type of information too, they are very well written articles.  I guess I just didn't absorb that much historical information considering all the hours I spent playing them.  At least not the way @Bregma describes learning about European history for EU.  But EU is definitely a different game than AoE or Civ.

I had a look at Ultimate General: Civil War yesterday.  That certainly looks like a game you could learn some American Civil War history from.

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