The perception of educational games as being "serious games" has a lot to do with how they're usually conceived. Most of the time, these games are thought of simply as a vehicle for feeding raw data into students, another way of getting the same type of information structured the same way as traditional lectures. Because of this, these games don't reach kids, they don't have fun with them, and the games don't get played. Quick experiment: Name an Educational Game. Got one? If you said "Math Blaster," congratulations! You've named a game that is over 20 years old and is usually the only example of an educational game a member of the general population can name. Unless you count Oregon Trail, where elementary school children learned dysentery was the number one killer of the west.
We, along with some other newer educational game companies, are beginning to take a different approach, focusing more on creating a fun and engaging game that kids will actually want to play. Instead of just taking paragraphs of information and shoehorning it into a matching game or trivia game, we work on creating games which make sense mechanically with the topic at hand. With this in mind, we have many game concepts in the works, with several in the prototype stages. I know I've been teasing these games, and I do want to show them as soon as they're ready. However, I don't like putting out products which are ill-formed or half-baked, and we also need to think about protecting intellectual property, so it may still be a few weeks before they go live on the website.
Neural Energy Games will focus initially on putting out several smaller flash games, each tuned to a small aspect in a certain topic in energy. From solar cell function to how to run a nuclear plant, there are many opportunities for creating interesting games for students.
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