Let's Talk Edutainment (and play the 1993 Oregon Trail!)

The fourth game in the pack was the Amazing Writing Machine, which... wasn't really a game, and is probably why I was having so much trouble finding it.

I would love to see you play the obscure Broderbund title "Alien Tales," which isn't even notable enough to have a wikipedia page. I got it in a CD-ROM budget collection with Carmen Sandiego, Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, and one other game I can't remember at the moment. I have no idea if it holds up, but I loved it as a kid. (As an aside, those budget CD-ROM releases in the late 90s were *great* for me. I also got a bunch of the Sim games in one, which gave me my first exposure to SimTower.) <a href="http://gaming.wikia.com/wiki/Alien_Tales" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://gaming.wikia.com/wiki/Alien_Tales</a>

I've still never played that one, I must fix this

LGR

Definitely have my eye out for it as it's certainly the kind of thing I'd enjoy

LGR

I still think Aviation Adventure would be up your alley. I mentioned it once before... It comes with a modified version of Corncob 3D called F4U Secret Sortie, and has a paper plane glider minigame as well as a bunch of actually cool paper airplane models with step-by-step instructions that I used to make as a kid.

Runefox

Super Solvers: Challenge of the Ancient Empires is, hands down. my favourite edutainment title. Although I'm really not sure it taught me anything. Good fun though!

My nostalgia awaken) Probably everyone has an inexplicable passion for some particular old game.

ZULEYKA GAMES

Ok, I'm well again. Anyone else?

John Covil

Man... I'm exhausted. Anyone else?

John Covil

I always liked Carmen Sandiego better than Oregon Trail, but then again, I'm a huge geography nerd. I'd love to see a Tech Tales style retrospective of Carmen Sandiego (though that may be too big of a scope for Edutainment Month.)

Steve Lovelace

If what you're saying is a Twitch channel where we can talk to LGR and discuss games while he plays it like distinguished people drinking tea... then yes pretty please

avfusion

Also, I do have a really big respect for old edutainment. Back in my middle school, I had a class where, for a full year, we played SimFarm. It ran at a speed that we would complete 3 years of seasons within our two semesters. That game had such a profound impact on me, and to this day I have a really serious garden in my back yard. Very serious. It's like a hobby of a hobby to me, but I spend so much time working on it, so much time creating gadgets to help me manage it. In a season, I produce more than enough food to feed my wife and I, and then some over. I don't think I would have ever found this as such a rewarding hobby if it wasn't for that SimFarm game. I'd love to play it again too, the nostalgia is all of a sudden overwhelming :P

avfusion

Get on the traaaaaiiiiilll &lt;3

avfusion

I remember the Public Domain programs that we used to copy and share: Biorhythms, Calendar, and I forget the others. They were great for us young 'uns that were hungry for free programs and they were written in BASIC so we could Run-Stop them, examine the code, and modify it. Great times!

Kind of related to your questions about the effect of edutainment titles, I'm reading Sonny Magana's 'Disruptive Classroom Technologies' where he introduces a framework that allows educators (in the broad sense of the word) to make impactfull changes in the way that technology enables learning, giving the students not just the objective tools (devices, internet, etc.) but the cognitive tools that will allow them to transform the way around them using such technology. Following that argument, one could say that edutainment software is a mixed bag of products that probably responded to different production goals and had different outcomes, bout if we think about games in general, I think that they have an amazing potential in creating problem-solving mindsets and enabling lateral thinking. Of course, not all games do it (and even less of them care about iy), but if we think about titles such as Incredible Machines or Monkey Island, just to name the first that come to mind, we can see that great potential in action. One can also say that games as an educational tool have to fight a hughe fight against the novelty effect, which wears out really qiuckly and, as David pointed out, can make different impacts on kids with different levels of exposure to them. On a final note, I really liked this format... Would you consider doing something like this but interactive, webinar style, with active discussion with your viewership?

LJFox

I don't consider logic puzzles edutainment. We have games that are strictly logic like the 7th Guest, 11th Hour, The Witness, and I don't consider those edutainment because the intent is NOT to teach you, you have to figure out those using what you ALREADY know (and if you can't figure it out, you may need a hint). So logic hints or inventory object puzzles in the HE games also don't really count to me. Same way that trivia games aren't edutainment because they don't intend to teach you, you do well at those depending on what you already learned outside the game. If the game taught you HOW to do a math based logic puzzle, I think that'd be different. Like you pretty much explained, there needs to be intent, or some kind of guidelines that makes it edutainment. Otherwise, ANYTHING can be edutainment by some people's definition. I learned to type with King's Quest 3, but it's not edutainment. It didn't teach me, I just happened to get good at it because it's one aspect of the game.

PushingUpRoses

I like edutainment for the same reasons. In 1987 we got a NES and a Tandy 1000 HX for Christmas and the rule was that we played games in the Nintendo and did school work, programming, and edutainment on the HX. I learned more by programming than playing edutainment titles but I do credit Mavis Beacon and the Apple IIC in my fourth grade classroom for my typing skills.

Ryan Yoder

There's definitely new 'living book' type stuff out there for iPad, but I'm not sure there's as much edutainment software meant for kids over 6-8 now? Definitely lots of "teach kids to code", but I feel like that's different, as it's inherently a computer thing. Also, Ski Free is definitely a slippery slope.

JennaKay

I think these edutainment games were a thing for a variety of different reasons. For one thing, in the early days of computers, us kids would play just about anything because the choices available were much more limited. And, like you said, these games were often highly approved by parents an educators because they felt we'd be learning something. And I remember kids playing edutainment games in some classrooms at school on Apple II computers and the kids were always really excited to play them. But when my turn came up, I was far less enthusiastic. This was most likely because I had a computer at home with real games and real graphics and music, and these crappy edutainment games (which many were just in text-mode) were just not that appealing to me. The other kids had no experience with computers at all, so it was just the novelty of using a computer for them, it didn't really matter what the game was.

The 8-Bit Guy

Damn it Clint my brain can't handle this nice footage of retro stuff :P I want that camera just to shoot stuff from my 20L4 PVM

The lady with the gun always scared me. Ramble on Clint.

Tom S