We were able to get Anthony Pecorella, designer of CellCraft to answer some questions about the game, and educational game development in general.

Anthony currently works as Head of Developer Relations at Kongregate.com and has been long been an aspiring game designer, though had only casually dabbled in Flash games prior to his work on CellCraft.  He studied mathematics and computer science in undergrad and graduate school at Wake Forest University.  He's also a band geek, avid bowler, and shows a canine-like love of catching Frisbees.

Can you give us a brief history on how and why CellCraft was created?
 

CellCraft is an educational game that seems to have been designed with the specific purpose of education the public (or at least the casual game market) about cell biology!

The game slowly introduces you to the mechanics of cell biology through a series of very well-designed tutorials. Each level will introduce one or two new problems that a cell might encounter, and then present you with an new enzyme, organelle, or function that the cell can use to deal with that problem. Gameplay is similar to a simple Real-Time Strategy game, which is a perfect fit for the educational content. Matching game elements to learning objectives is probably the most difficult part of educational game design, and this is a great example of a game that does it well. The tutorial makes good use of metaphor, explaining that ATP is like energy; glucose is like fuel; mitochondria is like a power plant; amino acids and fatty acids are building materials; enzymes and vacuoles are your defenses, and ribosomes are like factories. Many players of RTS games already know how to collect and use fuel and materials to build things with factories, so the metaphor helps reinforce the relationship between gameplay and learning objectives even more.