Uneducational "Educational" Games

I was recently asked to put in the Cool Math Games web site into the list of sites my younger sister can view in her white-list browser. Now, before adding a site to the list (which is kind of a pain due to the brokenness of that particular browser), I went to inspect it. The first thing I said to myself was, "woah, I'm glad she doesn't have epilepsy." The color scheme is just so abhorrent and psychedelic that I can't believe it's actually recommended or allowed by any education professionals. It could at least have semi-readable text. Also, I'm probably banging my head against a wall on this one, but I think it's a terrible idea for kid/educational web sites to have ads.

Next up, I checked out some of the games. One advertising itself as "the world's hardest game" caught my attention. It is indeed difficult, but there is a distinct lack of mathematics or science of any kind. (To be honest, the only reason it's hard at all is that the controls are really unresponsive.) Continuing my quest for legitimate education, I found some racing game allegedly about multiples. I guess it kind of did; you're supposed to jump (yes jump, cars can do that, you know) over the other vehicles that bear numbers that are multiples of a given number. It's a pretty dull game with essentially no learning or even testing going on.

On and on, I found totally pointless games that are not much better than just watching some video (and throw a whole lot more script errors, thank you, webmaster and browser developer). Now, just one web site with this kind of junk wouldn't be too shocking. However, this has been the case all over the internet. Everywhere I go, I find web sites with "learning" "games" for kids. Nine out of ten are pointless. The rare one that actually puts some effort into teaching/assessing has ads plastered all over the place. The only good one I've found so far is Starfall, which teaches language and a little math to kindergarten children.

Is there hope for our children? Maybe. We just have to get them away from mindless alpha-wave entertainment and into engaging educational environments. There aren't a lot of good games available for free, but YouTube and a few good sites have some awesome resources for mathematics and other important skills.