A game to teach programming, without you ever knowing it
Educational games can sometimes be a drag. The Munchers games were about as fun as a digital worksheet. There was no grand design and certainly not much more than a veneer of play. Machineers is an upcoming game that seeks to bury the education deep within the mechanics, and let your learning you be a function of play.
(Also I am pretty sure one of the characters in this game is Adabot post apocalypse.)
For Henrike Lode, creator of Machineers, in order for an educational videogame to exist as both simultaneously, it must be sneaky. “We are trying to prove that the receptiveness and motivation of players is much higher when they are not aware they are learning,” she says.
Machineers aims to teach players the basics and logic of computer programming by using metaphorical representations of programming concepts. Unlike Redstone in Minecraft, another metaphorical representation of programming that Lode considers too literal and “hardcore,” not once does Machineers even hint at the fact that these concepts can be applied in the real world.
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