Market for educational games

[Nysuatro]

WHat do you guys think about the market for educational games? It think this will become very big when finally schools are going to see the potentioal

of games in education. It is already starting but it still has to grow a lot. Somebody already has experience with an educational game or making one ..?

I think it would be a very cool challenge to make a game that fits for education on schools.

[Warby]

there is only one educational game i know of that i would actually consider "a game"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ks2bitesiz ... /pop.shtml

[Sentura]

i don't think there's any reason for a game to go over knowledge already found within books or other media. for insightful games however, i do think there is a (perhaps important) future.

[Nysuatro]

I know there are a lot people who have a visual memory. And they could be helped with games imo.

And not only the visual aspect, but also stuff like humour and .. can help to learn. Just my opinion ..

[Erratic]

Do I have to post Math Rescue and Word Rescue screenshots again?

[Sentura]

Do I have to post Math Rescue and Word Rescue screenshots again?

oh man, i remember those

[hessi]

actually i hold a presentation on that topic and the conclusion was that games or virtual reality and learning will fail when thrown together. you have to keep in mind that learning is much more than reading or listening to someone. learning is something creatures do with all senses.

if you are going for motivating people to get into a certain topic then i would agree that games can be supportive. they would work as some kind of appetizer. covering abstract or complex concepts is hard to accomplish in a virtual world (at least with todays hardware, I/O-systems etc.).

i also think that when lowering the expectations games can be refreshing compared to classic school class based learning. on the other hand most kids will know "cooler games" so those educational ones will always have a bad taste (for example because the graphics are old). remember that a book can be used for like 5-10 years. a game usually looks like crap after 2-3 years. if it doesn't than think about the effort on creating it.

overall: educational games have no big market and i doubt that they ever will.

[Nysuatro]

@Hessi : is there a chance I can read your presentation ?

Thanks for the replyes everyone. very interesting

[hessi]

the paper i used as areference was called "Situational Learning in Real and Virtual Space: Lessons Learned and Future Directions"

imo the paper is poorly written and is not as critical as it should or could be. if you have trouble getting the original, then tell me about it. i just dont want to spread things that have copyrights.

as for my presentation i can surely hand it out to you, but maybe you would need the comments/explanations and you would need to understand german it consists of 9 slides that i would have to translate. and even after translation it would only consist of words that i use as a guide to speak. so my advice would be to read the mentioned paper. if you have trouble finding it, feel free to drop me a line via some instant messenger of my choice (see profile).

[Taylor]

For my work experience I made a Systems and Design package in glorious Visual Basic in about 4 days, you basically populated a list of actions for a set of traffic lights to pass traffic in an efficient manner with no accidents, etc. A bit bare-bones but it worked. I later found out it was being successfully sold to schools for £100 a pop.

[Sentura]

For my work experience I made a Systems and Design package in glorious Visual Basic in about 4 days, you basically populated a list of actions for a set of traffic lights to pass traffic in an efficient manner with no accidents, etc. A bit bare-bones but it worked. I later found out it was being successfully sold to schools for £100 a pop.

what?! how?

[Warby]

i totally agree with this guy:

and let me completely disjointedly quote chris crawford here "playing is learning"

[Taylor]

For my work experience I made a Systems and Design package in glorious Visual Basic in about 4 days, you basically populated a list of actions for a set of traffic lights to pass traffic in an efficient manner with no accidents, etc. A bit bare-bones but it worked. I later found out it was being successfully sold to schools for £100 a pop.

what?! how?

It was relevant to the curriculum, there’s no competition in this market, and he would jet all over the place selling them. You could get them cheaper buying them in bulk, which schools would naturally do.

I think if I'd spent more time on it and made it more gamey, schools would have been less interested. Even if the Systems and Design part was intact.

[e-freak]

as in simmilar topics before, i'll link to "A theory of fun" by Raph Koster which pretty much sums up the whole learning in games/by games in a histo-cultural context and is pretty much focused on how to create a learning process in real games (instead of creating a real learning process and constructing a game around it, as it will most probably fail.)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Theory-Game-Des ... 1932111972