Stratolab’s massive research and development laboratory has just spit out a prototype of the next insanely great Stratolab game. It has no title yet but it involves time travel, hydrogen fusion reactors, windmills and electronic devices.
Download Electronics Game Prototype – Aug 2011
Kosmosis is a Communism themed space arcade game from Molleindustria, designers of the excellent McDonald’s Game parody. You play a space revolutionary and you have to organize your fellow proletariates. An especially intriguing aspect is the way your comrades move automatically like a flock of birds. As your group of comrades grow, the group starts to take care of itself and you can sit back and watch. Read his fun description of the space game as a reflection on America’s capitalistic and war-mongering society. The game is fun too.
http://www.molleindustria.org/kosmosis/kosmosis.html
Arcademic Skill Builders is a website with a few dozen excellent Flash games for teaching math and English Language Arts skills. I played Dirt Bike Proportions, a math game where you answer questions about fractions in order to go faster and beat friends in a race. I was quite impressed with the quality of the graphics, and especially that this game can support network play–you can race against three friends. I would like to see games develop higher level math skills.
The EduGamesBlog lists ten significant serious games. The games cover important social topics rather than academic skills. For example SimCity is the classic urban planning game and Re-Mission helps cancer patients understand their condition. Some of them are online/Flash games, but others are Windows-only downloads which need to be installed.
Flash Math Creativity is a book of programs that use relatively simple math and Flash to create digital art. I bought it years ago, and recently realized that it has a website that illustrates all the programs. Take a look:
http://www.friendsofed.com/fmc/FMCv2/FMC.html
Grow Island is a puzzle game. The player deploys different fields of engineering by clicking on a button. The fields can reinforce each other if they are deployed in the proper order. The goal is to find the optimum order to deploy each field.
Grow Island’s puzzle is simple in concept, but very tricky to solve. The feedback is subtle so you have to study it closely and try many times to figure out. You get clues when the different fields combine on the screen in some interest way. For example the machine developed with mechanical engineering combines with the computer to make a robot. That combines with aeronautic engineering to make a flying robot.
http://shingakunet.com/school/0000002190/special/19024701/0285/index.html
Flip Boom is a simple animation application for Mac OS X and Windows. It comes from the makers of Toon Boom, a well regarded animation package. I haven’t tried it out, but it looks cool from their website.
http://www.toonboom.com/products/flipboom/
Zach, one of our students from summer, wrote an animated tour of Stratolab’s international headquarters. Kitty Pretty, your hostess, shows around the spacious entry hall and explores the vast expanses of the programming chamber. The highlight of the tour is the robot wrestling arena. He missed the heliport on the roof though.
The animation was written in Scratch.
Copyright © 2007 Stratolab
