Educational Games, Fun and Safe

Educational Games

Educational games are games explicitly designed with educational purposes, or which have incidental or secondary educational value. All types of games may be used in an educational environment. Educational games are games that are designed to help people to learn about certain subjects, expand concepts, reinforce development, understand an historical event or culture, or assist them in learning a skill as they play. Game types include board, card, and video games. An educational game is a game designed to teach humans about a specific subject and to teach them a skill (Wikipedia).

Papa's Pizzeria, one of our favorite web-based games that are entertaining, challenging with so much educational materials.

Fun Games

Although not all games are specifically designed as educational games, most of them possess a certain degree of learning, not just for the purpose of having fun. However, the successful educational games must possess adequate entertaining aspect in it. Children are unique personalities, they react differently in games made by adults. Games that are liked by children are most probably possess the least learning material, while in contrary the least liked games possess more or even full of learning materials (based on school curriculum). This is the challenge we are facing today, harmonizing the level of fun (and mostly addictive) content of play with the learning content required by children to be a better human being.

Great educational games are interactive play that teaches us goals, rules, adaptation, problem solving, interaction, all represented as a story. They give us the fundamental needs of learning by providing - enjoyment, passionate involvement, structure, motivation, ego gratification, adrenaline, creativity, social interaction and emotion (Wikipedia). Many examples show us that successful games, in terms of commercial profit and number of hardcore fans that are perceived negatively by the educational society, are actually full of fundamental learning tidbits inside it.

Make no mistake, games like Minecraft or Madden NFL are actually very rich in educational materials. Look how the fans of these kind of games are so passionately involved with the character & the story, forcing them to be very creative in solving problems inside the game setting, getting them to reach out to more online friends to work together on a group task, and so on. Those are very educational. Yet, the society is still considering those kind of games bring negative impact to children. The most mentioned reason is the addictive effect of those games that is so harmful to kids.

Education experts have come up with many ideas and suggestions on how to deal with the dilemma like that. One of the most common recommendations are time management and the choice of games that children could play. Most big games such as Minecraft and Madden are time-consuming gameplays. It takes hours, even days, to play and complete the game. Kids are exhausted and trapped into a situation that they cannot escape. That later brings the feeling of anxiety, anger, and other negative behaviors. So, parents should arrange a strict time allocation for playing game, and most importantly choose and filter the game that kids could play.

Safe Games

Our initiative in Safe Games for Children, among other things, is trying to help parents with the selection of games that are not time-consuming with lower addictive level. Web-based games that are made with Flash and HTML 5 are suitable for that particular condition. However, playing online games in the Internet is getting more unsafe for everybody. Unfiltered game titles are common and mostly made to trap gamers to unwanted and harmful material for children. Not to mention the acts of cyber bullying in networked games, and also cyber stalking by strangers in games that open up their users publicly.

Therefore, we curated game titles that suit children's needs and special requirements. We hope that kids could go to this kind of game websites and play safe yet fun and educational games that they like. We asked real kids to collect games that they like, then several educators will filter and check those games based on its educational and safety aspects. Surprisingly, most titles are simple games that are casual but still engagingly fun.

And here we are, a network of websites, each with different topics and playable game titles, that are safe for our children to play and get around. This initiative is an ongoing process. We appreciate any inputs or critics to make this a much better place for our kids, virtually.