well I lie there are a few, companies like Creative assembly and Paradox interactive have been making amazing historical games, while Valve’s portal 2 will clearly teach children a bit about momentum. the problem is that in most countries the educational system is too rigid, and some times teachers simply have no idea what games are out there, and while it might be hard to make maths fun , if for example you use it like in Europa Universalis III (empire building game) to keep the finances of your empire working people do learn very quickly what to do, now if you have ever played this game you know the maths is very basic and the gameplay very hard but I am sure this can be fixed in the future.

P.S Because of that game I now know random regions and cities all over Europe and I learnt how inflation works and what centralisation and decentralisation do in a country.

Can you suggest something?

David

Or is the quality of the learning experience enough?

How are you measuring quality and learning. The Educational games you cite are operate at an entirely uni-structural level. Verbs we can apply are – memorise, identify, recognise, count, define, draw, find, label, match, name, quote, recall, recite, order, tell, write, intimate. Why? Because instructional designers make terrible game designers for one and secondly because students have to be able to move past this level to more complex decoding of why they are doing it. In themselves they have un-attractive goals. You can add all the graphics you like, but if you fail to move past and provide fluid, iterative pathways to and from this level or ‘learning’ it’s just plain boring and not worthy of being called a game.
How bad are these games as a learning experience? No worse than the experience in a classroom founded on Blooms Taxonomy and blogging. They too fail to understand the learning archetypes in the games that you cite later. In my view – with invention, you can use most commercial games on Xbox, Playstation, DS etc to create amazing learning experiences. It is a sad reality that most teachers believe that Web2.0 can do similar. It cannot. Consider that games are a document – but that most teachers are completely unable to read. In fact 3/4 year olds are highly capable learners without the literacies we assume we must first teach – letters, number, shapes – Any 4 year can play highly complex games, because the games are in themselves complex knowledge and learning systems.

What’s out there?

I challenge anyone to a duel. Take a topic, take your content, take your outcomes. You select you most powerful Web2.0 tools and methods, and I’ll use non Web2.0 and a commercial game system. At the end, kids present their work and defend it. I’ll win – because educational game developers are driven by content based goals, and must serve their market equally ignorant of how games work. In professional development of teachers – playing Warcraft with them will change their worldview and make them far more inventive that giving them information and hope they use it. Why? Because in playing from scratch in Warcraft, I can explain how today’s 1 billion gamers learn. From that you can easily rethink how the classroom can work.

However, I am an outlier … and possibly insane according to the norms reformers.

http://www.deangroom.com