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That would appear to be the case if this week’s Games for Change Festival in New York was any indication. I don’t write about education often, but the exposure to a range of developers eager to make games that effect change got me thinking about why so many of them were geared to kids.
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Educational games are estimated to be an $8.4 billion market in the U.S. And at a high level, the industry seems to agree that educational titles are effectively complementing traditional classroom and book learnin’.
But in listening to developers and educators at the festival, I noticed a curious limit to the discussion: Educational games were almost always implied to be aimed at children.
But what about a straightforward lesson? You may want to learn to code, or take another crack at calculus, or figure out what happened in the Civil War, but you haven’t set foot in a school in ages. Sure, you can read a book or watch a college lecture online, but I’d wager most of the educational games you’ll find are clearly for the younger set, like Lexica:
Amplify Games: The World of Lexica™ (new)
Source: Re/code and Amplify Education Channel (YouTube)