I think this is relevant enough to post without getting too much flack:

http://www.gog.com/forum/general/humongous_entertainment_support_thread

I'm not sure why that would make a difference. For the purposes of education, touchscreens are inferior to the previous methods of control. Granted, they're a bit easier than a mouse, but you lose out on the other clicks.

Sounds like there's a chance Humongous may soon be among-us! :D

Yes, I think edutainment titles could add to GoG's bottom line very nicely. Homeschoolers, in particular, appreciate these. I haven't seen many good edutainment titles for the post-kindergarten children, but kids keep being born and growing ever day, so why not bring back the best of the older ones?

This would definitely include Humongous titles. There may be plenty of apps, but their stories are much more involving

Older kids

DK titles "Pinball Science" & The Way Things Work" (David Macaulay) are the best! Funny and informative, and best of all, fun to play. These were my son's favorites. Now you can hardly find them or make them play if you did!

DK also had "Eyewitness" software that was more deliberately educational but the one with an old ship & Eyewitness Cat kept my kids' interest Most educational software doesn't manage that

Cluefinders
Dr Brain series

Qin: Tomb of the Middle Kingdom

Herod's Tomb game (a HOG but informational!)

- Teens -
Physica, Chemicus, and Bioscopia
(They helped my daughter with those classes.)

I made sure to vote for as many as I could find and added these wishes myself
http://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/the_way_things_work_20
http://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/david_macaulays_pinball_science

its about involvement. And for young kids the typing skills arent there yet and theres a lot they want to teach besides typing. I once saw a class of 9 year olds have to type a password "Student". It took most of them 5+ tries. Also consider the market for edutainment mostly comes from two places: mobile apps, and schools. If a school buys new, they buy *new*. Still, it would be cool if gog got a couple of particularly high quality titles. But its understandable that its not a genre they can easily slide into.

TBH, kids that young should have absolutely nothing to do with computing equipment, it's just going to fuck up their brain. By the time they're 8, they should be more than prepared for things like this.

Have kids really gotten that stupid in the years since I was a kid? I remember that we were using Apple ][ computers and if we were lucky we got to use the SE ones that had more than one color. Granted, we weren't doing much in Apple OS, but I do remember having to load up the appropriate game on the disk.

The edutainment market in general is much, much worse than it was during the golden era. There's some clever stuff, but it's mostly a triumph of style of substance. There's some stuff like Rocksmith that's pretty fucking amazing, but in general, most of it isn't that good.

I think kids can handle the older games, children are a lot smarter than adults give them credit for. I was able to play games on the computer just fine as a half-point. Two edutainment games I remember the most clearly were AJ's World of Discover and Curious George's Downtown Adventures. Those games kept me busy for a while. On the school computers, I remember playing Oregon Trail and computer chess.

To be blunt, if we keep regarding children as stupid than they are going to continue to act stupid and never grow. However, but give them the chance and the expectation and they will strive meet them. They can learn and that is the whole point of edutainment games, to be given a challenge and learn.

F*** That shit! More like WHY THE HELL DID THEY MAKE THAT GAME?

My son went to a magnet school that focused on technology - in other words technology was a key class along with math, science, english etc... Anyway, the first 20 minutes of the 90 minute period were spent learning to touch-type. It frustrated the heck out of him but now can touch-type as fast as any professional typist. The thing was that he HAD to do those 20 minutes before he was allowed to move onto something more enjoyable. But it made doing a lot of his homework so, so much easier for him. And it is one of those amazing skills to carry into adulthood...

As to GOG bringing these types of games here, I recall spending quite a lot of money on edutainment games - I stumbled upon The Logical Journey of the Zoombini's the other day and it gave me a huge smile... Totally agree that GOG is missing out on selling to a possibly significant market segment by not adding a section devoted to parental units that remember some really great educational games ;-)

The main challenge with teaching kids that age to type is their hand size and their ability to cover the entire keyboard. Once somebody has cause to learn to type, it happens fairly quickly. But, I think I would have learned a lot more quickly, had I access to a good typing program when I was younger.

Personally, I would wait until they're at least 10, but that's just me.
When I was in school, I got away with a ton of crap because the schools expected kids to be stupid. So, the fact that I was smarter than the teachers by the time I was 10, meant that I could get away with pretty much anything I wanted to, provided there wasn't a tape of me doing it.

Kids can be incredibly clever and if the people in charge aren't paying attention, they can do all sorts of stuff.

Yes, it was middle school - 6th grade - and agree that hand size matters though little kids learn to play the piano at a really early age...

Challenge - also agreed! Frankly the educational system feels the need to impart a specific set of information without also imparting a love of learning at the same time. Expectations have to be set to the lowest common denominator due to lack of funds/huge class sizes and there's the rub. We're dumbing it down and getting the expected result :-(

I defiantly would buy Eagle Eye Mysteries games is available.

I'd love the Carmen Sandiego games here. Who even has the Broderbund properties?

According to Wikipedia, they were bought by The Learning Company, which is itself a division of the text book company Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Since it appears that they never went to bankruptcy court and had their things auctioned off, chances are good that TLC still owns all that IP.

The ones I'd most want to see are Gizmos and Gadgets and The Yukon Trail.

Kid's Typing with Spooky the ghost, where you possessed various things in the house and scared the hell out of the residents was absolutely awesome, "concentrate on accuracy." Super Munchers was solid; Math Mountain was great fun; Math Blaster was also a good one; and there was a really, really good set that was all about Snoopy and had things like US Geography, flying the dog house, and math (all in one game). And of course Oregon Trail II was the best. I would buy any of those if they made it to GOG in a heartbeat.