Aardman Digital has released several very good Flash games in recent months. Home Sheep Home is great fun, but isn't really all that relevant to educational games so I'm not going to spend any time talking about it.

Their most recent game Sprocket Rocket, was created to teach about the various functions of the the UK Patent and Trademark office. The game features the eccentric inventor Wallace, and his patient assistant Gromit, from Aardman's famous and award-winning animated Wallace & Gromit films Players get a crash-course in intellectual property law by flying their little steam-powered rocket pod around a map and collecting little stickers that reveal small snippets of information about copyright, trademarks and patents. The way the game delivers the educational content isn't that impressive, but the way the game gets players to care about that content definitely is!

By driving your rocket pod into a docking bay, you can design your own tools by drawing them onto a blueprint, similar to the bridge design interface in Cargo Bridge. The game is filled with dozens of very fun, clever, and challenging physics based puzzles, all with the goal of collecting small orange cogs. As you collect cogs, you earn new types of joints for your tools. You start out with a stiff joint, and can unlock a loose, spin, and torque joints. Your tool is limited by the size of the blueprint, and by the fact that you can only place one joint, and it has to be where the tool connects to the pod, but this still gives you plenty of freedom to apply creative solutions to the puzzles.

Because all of the puzzles are physics-based, they often have many different solutions. This is a must for a game that is trying to teach you to value your own creative problem solving abilities. The game even lets you generate a code that can be used to share your tools with others! A few of the puzzles also showcase famous inventions themselves, including a mechanical counting device made using geometric shapes and the physics engine (which I assume is Box2D)

Sprocket Rocket also has a great tutorial, which starts out holding your hand, and slowly leaves you to your own devices.

Play Sprocket Rocket