The Best Educational Game I Ever Know

Last night, I was spending my time to browse free games from my fav search engine. And I found one game, that surprised me and said "This is the Best Educational Game I ever know". Why? Ok, before I found this game, I have written an article about educational games in my Indonesian Blog. This is what I am saying in that article.


Games as Learning Media
In this post, I am going to share some opinions about the game as a learning media. There are several reasons why I choose this topic:

• I am a gamer.
• I am a game developer.
• I am a prospective teacher.

Based on that fact, I was so interested in this topic. Yeah, sometimes I looks like forced my hobby with education, but seriously it must be awesome if education can be performed together with playing games.

How it Works?
I was thinking, if during the lecture felt like playing DotA with friends or playing Dinner Dash and Cooking Academy, we discuss about the hero that will be used, the combination of skills that will be cast, the type of item build that will be effective in certain conditions, then the learning process will be fun and full of spirits. We exchange ideas, share knowledges, and all was done without a burden.

Is it possible to make that happen? 
Now there are so many educational games that were created with the hope that students can learn and play. Yeah, it is work, student can LEARN and PLAY, not PLAY and LEARN. The developer of the game just force education to match with their game, not blend them into one game. There are big differences between "LEARN and PLAY" and "PLAY and LEARN". In the first case, we learn something and there is a game in it. The second one, we playing the game, and we learn something, can you see the differences?

It must be cool if the big game company like Bandai, Namco, Blizzard, Valve, etc works with educational people to create something different for educational world. They are making a game, a FULL GAME about a student that trapped in digital world while playing with one of computer in school's lab. It can be Role-playing games or action games, but the goal is to find a way to back to the real world. While finding a way back to the real world, we can insert some educational materials in it, and here is the real educational game.

Oh I found that Game!
After posting this in few months ago, last night I found a game that I was looking for, the real educational games, and it was the best educational game I ever know in my life. Its CellCraft, an educational, real-time strategy game about cellular biology and developed by Brain Juice, has just been released under an open source license. You can play it here CellCraft Game. And this is the source code in GitHub.

Keyword (Indonesia) : game edukasi, cellcraft open source