Educational Games

[JohnnyDash89]

#11732

Hi Guys,

I’m new to the forum so I don’t know if this has been suggested already or not. But wouldn’t it be cool to do an episode on educational games?

For example: growing up in the Netherlands I played a lot of Word Rescue as kid (below 10) and it really teached me the basics words of the English language even before I got English Classes in school.
And who can forget about the spinoff Math rescue?
Also the founder and creator of Redwood Games (Karen Crowther) has a pretty cool backstory!
https://www.redwoodgames.com/karen.html

Another educational game I played a lot as kid was Animal Quest (shareware version) in which you learn how the food chain in the forest works. The paid version also had the African Savanna and the Ocean, if I’m correct.
And apparently it had a “remake” in 2019 so that’s also pretty cool!

Other games that might be included are: Donald Ducks Playground, the Putt Putt games and the Redcat games (although that last one might only be distributed in the Netherlands since Davilex is the developer).

Hopefully you can do something with this suggestion, or at least you get inspiration for a future episode!

[red.hexapus]

#11734

Nice idea, I would definitely like to check out some edutainment DOS games 🙂

[DJ_HiP]

#11735

We’ve often touched on many Edutainment games, it’s hard to draw a line on what you review.

The Super Solvers series, such as Treasure Mountain or Challenge of the Ancient Empires, through to the Carmen Sandiego series.

As computers made their way into classrooms many companies jumped onboard and made 100’s of these learning games, often very shallow ‘gaming’ wise but repetative learning for teachers to be comfortable providing ‘computer time’.

It’s such a wide net, but I’m sure we can come up with a focus and put an episode together 🙂

@Pix are you up for playing every Edutainment game out there like the Golf episode? 😉

[Tijn]

#11736

I don’t think it’s a good idea to feature “all edutainment” titles in a single month hahah

But that said, I am very much interested in doing this! And we can definitely look at multiple titles. Maybe 3-5 prominent entries in the genre or something?

[Evil Taco]

#11738

Yeah, this is a great suggestion for a theme month, it would be a great way to justify featuring them (contrast finding such a good/interesting edutainment game to “fill” a whole month …)

I too recall playing Apogee’s Word Rescue as a kid. I do believe it expanded my English vocabulary at the time.

I guess Mario is Missing is also an educational game? It came with our computer and I played it for far too long. It’s a bummer it was just pre-installed on the hard drive and not supplied as a floppy disk, I lost it at some point. But it was pretty boring. At the time I didn’t think anything how weird it was to have Mario and Luigi et al in a DOS game.

Can’t think of other DOS edutainment examples off the top of my head that I played back in the day. I’ll report back if I recall more, this is quite fun!

[Evil Taco]

#11739

I could see this as a “show and tell” episode!

[dr_st]

#11740

Rayman Education games!
https://raymanpc.com/wiki/en/Category:Educational_games

[JohnnyDash89]

#11742

Yes, a show and tell episode would be perfect for these kind of games. Especially seeing that everyone reacting here immediately has other core memory’s unlocked about these games

And that being said, another core memory just got unlocked for me (and apparently it counts as an educational game). Bert’s dinosaurs: A coloring book “game” about dinosaurs.
https://dosgames.com/game/berts-dinosaurs/

I only had that particular one, but apparently there are also other versions like Bert’s Christmas and so.

[Tijn]

#11743

Oh yeah, I love the idea of a “show and tell” episode!

[patrick_wd]

#11744

My favorite was probably Ancient Empires, but that has already been mentioned, so I’ll add a couple more.

Mario Teaches Typing
Sierra’s Dr. Brain series.

[Tijn]

#11745

My personal favourites btw are Gizmos & Gadgets and Thinky Things (Windows 3.x), both from 1993.