Fun

Here are fun and inspiring things we’ve found.

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

• Genre: Arcade Games
• Graphics: 8/10 — Fine vintage look
• Sound: 8/10 — Spooky swarmy sound
• Quality: 9/10 — Nicely polished
• Fun: 8/10
• Overall: 8/10

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.

• Genre: Networked Arcade Games
• Graphics: 8/10 — Nothing exciting but well made
• Sound: 8/10
• Quality: 9/10
• Fun: 7/10 — It’s pretty fun for a math game.
• Overall: 8/10

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.

• Genre: Puzzle
• Graphics: 8/10 — Delightfully cute
• Sound: 5/10 — Good for the first 30 seconds, then it gets repetitive.
• Quality: 8/10
• Fun: 8/10 — It’s cool when you figure out a good combination and the animations come alive.
• Overall: 8/10

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.