Best Educational Video Games

Video games have gotten a lot of flak from detractors, especially recent titles.  They’ve been decried as subversive, wastes of time, and downright evil.  Many games feature adult situations such as gore, violence, and partial nudity and they, unfortunately,  garner the lion’s share of attention while many good and wholesome games are overlooked.   However, because of the unique entertainment properties that digital media embodies, video games have long been excellent tools for the advancement of education. 
In fact, some of my fondest memories of grade school are of the times I spent crossing the country in and 1800 era covered wagon on the Oregon Trail.  Here’s a list of games that proves gaming is not just for thick-headed goons.


1) The Oregon Trail


Released in 1985 by Broderbund software, this epic game features historic situations and places young minds in the boots of intrepid settlers who struggled across the nation’s inhospitable mid-section to start new lives on the west coast.  As a player, you must assemble your party, purchase supplies, and plot the best route to get safely across the country while facing obstacles such as dysentery, the Rocky Mountains, and finally the Colorado River.  This game is unique in that it tries hard to bring a realistic portrayal of a pioneer’s life to young children.  It’s one thing to read about wagon trails in a boring book but an entirely different animal to be on one of those trails with the fate of your family hanging on your choices.  That said, I used to get perverse pleasure from inscribing the tombstones of my fallen.


2) Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego


Another Broderbund title released in 1985, this game feature an archetypal “sticky fingered filcher” in a red trench coat and hat that globe trotted around the world always one step ahead of the Acme Detective agencies agents (the players).  Along the way, Carmen and her nefarious gang of henchmen dropped cryptic clues as to the next destinations and it was up to the detectives to ferret out where in the world she was headed.  This game was great because it injected action and adventure into geography (a topic that I still find boring today) and really got me jazzed about learn where Reykjavik was or what the capital of France was.  The lines were long at my school’s Apple II Es because of this game and winter recesses were never much fun unless you got to play.


3) Number Munchers


This title was released by MECC in 1988 and spawned a host of sequels including Word Munchers and Fraction Munchers.  The game featured the titular Munchers (green, vaguely frog-like critters) that hopped around a game board “munching” numbers which were answers to mathematical equations.  If the correct number was munched, the player advanced.  If the incorrect number was munched, Troggles came out and gobbled the poor Muncher up.  While the game never did really instill a life-or-death mentality in me when it came to math, it certainly made learning a whole lot more fun.  My personal favorite in the series was Fraction Munchers and I give that game credit for helping me wrap my mind around the concept of 1/16th.


4) Alpha Beam With Ernie


We’re going old school with this one.  In 1983 the Children’s Computer Workshop and Sesame Street released Alpha Beam with Ernie on the Atari 2600.  The whole point of the game was to maneuver a small spacecraft and capture letters in a tractor beam.  The letters were then placed in their corresponding slot within Ernie’s space shuttled and once it was fully loaded down with “fuel” the craft blasted off.  It was great fun, I think partially because it featured the Atari Kids Controller input device, and was one of the few edutainment games I remember from my childhood that featured a licensed character as the main mover and shaker.  The Children’s Computer Workshop released a whole line of similar games featuring iconic characters from Sesame Street but many of them (like Cookie Monster Munch) were far less educational and often featured repetitive gameplay.


5) Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing


Mavis Beacon was a fictional character created by a marketing department deep within the bowels of Software Toolworks to sell their products, much like Aunt Jemima.  As a marketing ploy it worked extremely well but that’s not to say that those products weren’t worth the price paid for them.  In 1989 computers were still relatively new.  Many people were just getting their first PCs and the internet was really just a daydream.  Mavis Beacon featured several titles that were specifically designed to get this burgeoning crop of newbie computer users up to speed, and what passed for computer literate back in the day.  The typing software was a fun an interactive way to teach standard typing practice and increase typing speed.  This single tool became iconic for an entire generation and is responsible for many a fleet finger.  I know that my high school Computer Literacy teacher could sure have benefitted from a few lessons from old Mavis.


6) America’s Army


While many people see this game as a blatant recruitment tool (which it undoubtedly is) and a subversive waste of taxpayer money (which it may be) the life lesson’s that the game imparts cannot be overlooked.  Many of the games on the market today (especially FPSs) glorify killing and minimize moral and ethic consequences.  Though it wasn’t an intended result, America’s Army effectively combats that false impression than many young people mistakenly adhere to.  In this game there are real consequences for your choices.  People die and don’t come back, and the enemies are faithfully portrayed and not caricatures as they so often are in other titles.  While it was the Army’s intention to drum up recruits using this free software, it may have done the opposite in some cases and shown young men and women that enlistment was about duty, civic responsibility, and patriotism not guns, guts, and glory.  That’s an important lesson in social studies if ever there was one.