Keeping your mind sharp is not always an easy task. After being at work all day, it can be tempting to just turn your brain off and collapse onto the couch afterward. Luckily, there are several apps and websites these days that can help you stay sharp. With these educational games listed below, you’ll hardly believe that you’re still exercising your cranium muscles! Learning doesn’t have to be boring, and it’s much more worthwhile when you’re enjoying yourself.
Sporcle
This website has a nearly limitless supply of quizzes and brain games to keep you thinking. You can find almost any subject you can think up, from anatomy to zoology, geography to geology, and everything in between. Many of the quizzes have timers, so you can race against the clock and see how you stack up against other users who’ve already taken it, or just try to beat your previous score. Be careful though – if you aren’t paying attention to the time, you might spend the entire evening finding new challenges!
Gazillionaire Deluxe
This is one of the premier educational games for learning business and economics. Whether you want to develop a more well-rounded understanding of the stock market, or hone your business skills without risking your own funds, this game will help you get there. It’s used in colleges and universities around the country to show a real-time simulation of economic markets. As you think about profit margin and overhead along with account balances and growth, you’ll quickly learn what it’s like to not only run a business, but how rewarding success as a business tycoon can be!
Gazillionaire Deluxe is one of the many educational games that you can download and play without an Internet connection, which makes it great for plane flights or car rides. You can also find a version compatible with tablets.
Immune Attack
While most games that have a first-person navigating component to them usually involve simulated motorized vehicles, this one takes a different approach. In this game you’re piloting a nanobot throughout the human body and targeting various issues that can come up in your immune system. Along the way, aside from dealing with the enemy of immune systems, you’ll learn about how these attackers function and target the human body. This game was developed to help medical students learn about immunodeficiencies, and why certain ailments are found together.
Immune Attack is available to download, so you can take this game with you wherever you travel as well. While most starship-shooter games don’t have any learning components to them, you can have all the fun but still find out a few new interesting facts at the same time with this one!
Warzone 2100
As with most real-time strategy games, this one involves pitting you against the computer or other players in a campaign to gain control of the entire map. While these are not strictly educational games, per se, they do challenge you to think about the entire map as a whole, where your forces will be deployed, and when to attack. Like the name suggests, strategy is key, and you’ll need to do a fair amount of thinking to be successful.
There are many other real-time strategy games out there, such as Blizzard’s StarCraft and Microsoft’s Age of Empires, but these require you to buy the game. With Warzone 2100, you have the same general strategy component and thought processes to go through, but the game is entirely open source and free of charge.
Learning new concepts and keeping your mind functioning at a high level doesn’t need to be a chore. With these educational games, you’ll have fun and exercise your mind at the same time! What games do you enjoy? Leave a comment below and let us know!
Photo by woodleywonderworks
Megan L.