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.

Joe Rheaume of Chronotron fame has been doing a fabulous job writing reviews on this site of casual games and the educational principles they are built on. As the primary sponsor of this non-profit web site I am ecstatic about all the excitement surrounding the casual game market. Web Courseworks’ casual game Gridlock Buster, developed for the University of Minnesota’s ITS Institute, has already s

Math is the driving force behind most arcade-style games. The process of programming a game with a ship that can rotate and fire in a 360 degree arc, with missiles that accelerate and explode when they reach a target coordinate, expanding into a radius derived from the missiles power level, damaging nearby ships, and pushing them at the correct angle with a force that drops off exponentially from the distance of the center of the explosion, has given me more practice with trigonometry than all of the math homework I've ever done, and it certainly was more relevant and interesting to me.

Welcome to GamesCanTeach! This blog is a non-commercial project of Web Courseworks. Our goal is to promote game-based learning by bridging the gap between academic research and practice, enabling game-based learning practitioners, academics, developers, teachers, trainers, and everyone else who cares about game-based learning to:

• Keep up on the best ideas being generated by the casual Flash game development community,
• Engage with the insights of academic research into game-based learning,
• Bring those two realms together in their work, and,
• Have fun doing it.