Not really a full "game", but I found this picture-based Morse code trainer from Experiments with Google a fun and easy way to learn Morse code: https://morse.withgoogle.com/learn/
I once had an idea to make a Morse code learning game, where the message would be emitted by a distant warship in a storm emitting flashes of light in your direction :) to add some emotion to the task :) but never really tried to execute on it yet.
A few years ago I tried to get into vim off and on for over a year. I played this game for a few hours and all of a sudden I had the muscle memory needed to navigate vim. I've been a happy vim user for years now.
I can't explain it, but there is something about games that really reinforce this kind of learning.
I enjoyed it a lot in level 1, great game design I learned things that I wouldn't have sat down to learn. How many levels do you get before you have to pay $25?
I also opened this thread to recommend Vim Adventures. I tried teaching myself vim with standard walkthroughs but it was too difficult to remember all of the different key combinations.
Vim Adventures was so effective because it only lets you use the keys that it teaches you, and slowly expands the key set over time. Well worth the $25 if you want a guided introduction.
So all Zachtronics games.
Also Kerbal space program. Fantastic game, you'll learn about celestial mechanics, the basics of designing rockets (and if you keep playing, stuff like the Oberth effect and how to do a nice interplanetary Hohmann transfer )
Wanna learn history? Pick up some of the Paradox grand strategy games; Europa Universalis, Victoria, Hearts of Iron, Crusader Kings. A side effect is that you'll pick up a lot of geography by osmosis, which is in my experience, the easiest way to learn that subject - you're looking at maps and borders and terrain features constantly.
Wargaming is in general a good way to pick up information on historical topics. Most developers that are in that niche put a lot of effort into doing the research, and there is typically a lot of information baked into the in-game documentation at your fingertips, not to mention being a springboard for Wikipedia safaris.
> A side effect is that you'll pick up a lot of geography by osmosis, which is in my experience, the easiest way to learn that subject - you're looking at maps and borders and terrain features constantly.
My son loves Crusader Kings 2 (and EU3), and had such an easy time in his history class because of this. He knew the geography of Europe down cold.
He's currently digging into Hearts of Iron IV.
To be honest these grand strategy games aren't really my thing but I should give them a shot. Their systems just seem overwhelming to a new player.
definitely agree here. i think i know a tremendous amount about ww2 history since it's a hobby of mine, but wouldn't ya know, through playing hearts of iron 4 i've learned a tremendous amount more about the era and by extension how it shaped the world afterward.
you're also 100% correct regarding geography. it's hard to get a real feeling for exactly how huge asia is until you're having difficulty getting supply to your front line deep in northwestern china. not to mention that i have a pretty good feeling for where all of the tiny pacific islands are now (attu island, i'm looking at you).
I don't think its enough to actually learn language on its own, so it's best used mixed with a more formal method of language learning. It's fun and addictive enough that I actually keep using it, so that makes it good to me.
Check out their new Stories program if you haven’t yet. I've found it to be a refreshing change of pace, compared to the typical lessons. As the name implies, you're presented a story, and after each sentence, they quiz you on the meaning of the sentence that you just encountered.
I've been doing Duo (French) for a couple of months, but a I'm not sure I've learnt anything, it just feels like I've reinforced past learning.
I started Chinese, and it just seems so much of a mish-mash - it's like they just randomise testing and eventually you glean enough from the test questions to answer.
With French the closest I've come to learning, that I can point to, is from users answers to comments from other user. And the good and bad are mixed, there's no clarity.
Duo taught me japanese characters, but I had a hard time really improving my french grammar from it. There's no substitution for in-person conversation.
A radio ad for the second season of the Duolingo podcast prompted me to check out the first season.
I appreciate the idea that the episodes are life stories instead of fake cafe scenes. The stories are interesting, and sometimes intense. The CEO / cofounder talks about a kidnapping in his family in the last episode of season one.
The small english summaries every few sentences helps provide context. That helps with context for the words I'm not familiar or strong with.
The language used is intermediate level. Personally I am below that level, but have gotten value from episodes.
Have you tried italki.com? Better than playing games to learn a language(never works) and better than killing yourself slowly through classroom learning.
I’d highly recommend fluent forever instead. You’ll actually learn a language instead of thinking you are without making progress. It’s also much much faster.
Those show up with a minute of sponsored distraction inside SO MANY youtube videos (any video about math or puzzles from the last year) that I started to dislike instead of like them
An example of too much advertising having adverse effect, at least on me :p
I can't emphasize this site enough. The Python Challenge has a special place in my heart. I was a bored C# .NET developer. In my downtime I would poke at a challenge. I learned Python through this site; picking up the standard library as the challenges progressed. From my experience with this site I was able to land a Python webdev position.
pythonchallenge.com changed the course of my career and I'm grateful for it.
I found flexboxfroggy (http://flexboxfroggy.com) to be an excellent resource for learning flexbox when I came across it.
Just enough gamification, and enough straight concepts to allow me to build confidence quickly and make it a bit easier to remember the knobs flexbox offers.
Learn virtually any programming language by completing series of puzzles. Tests are all written for you. They just made a huge overhaul of their UX, and it’s really nice looking. I’m using it to try to learn Rust and Elixir at the moment.
Circuit scramble is a fun game on Android for learning and visualizing logic circuits. It's not directly relevant to anything I do, but I enjoyed playing through it.
Factorio does a decent job teaching the intuition behind running a factory.
http://lyricstraining.com does language teaching by having you watch/listen to music videos in that language on youtube and filling in the lyrics. Super fun!
Try any popular RPG, or otherwise dialog-heavy game with quests and instructions and such, but switch the language package. For example I did this with the Diablo games to help me learn Polish. A cool part is you pick up a lot of archaic vocabulary that your average native speaker doesn't even know. :)
in the 70s on the PLATO system (predates the internet) there was a game called bugs and drugs.
It was a graphical dungeon in orange/black 512x512 where you used medicines to attack diseases. Medical students used it to learn pharmacology.
The PLATO network functionality predates much of the internet.
<<PLATO's most popular game, is one of the world's first MUDs and has over 1 million hours of use.[citation needed]. The games Doom and Quake can trace part of their lineage back to PLATO programmer Silas Warner.>>
Raymond Smullyan's books can teach a fair bit about logic, up to about Godel's theorems and the halting problem (I remember To Mock a Mockingbird fondly), through carefully written sequences of puzzles that lead up to proofs of them.
If you try to go through his books encoding the puzzles and their solutions in Coq, then you'll learn quite a lot about Coq and constructive mathematics also.
An interesting idea! I've long wanted to go through more of his books, and I've also long wanted to learn Coq, so that sounds like an interesting combination.
I learnt it mostly for the sake of learning something new, I didn't really think at the time whether it would be worthwhile. It's a very specific tool developed by people in very specific fields of CS (type theory, compiler verification, but I could be wrong about this), so I just never felt bad about not having a use for it myself.
Encoding (a subset of) the puzzles as SAT problems for something like z3 would be an alternative to Coq.
Play The Witness (the-witness.net). The game is full of puzzles which each teach you a different concept. It's a great experience to play this game. Avoid spoilers!
Honestly the kid section of bookstores is amazing to me. There are so many hyper pedagogical book/games/labs to learn about anything. I don't know why we don't shop there as adult
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadhttp://nandgame.com was posted on HN recently and I found it to be fun and educational: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17508151
A few years ago I tried to get into vim off and on for over a year. I played this game for a few hours and all of a sudden I had the muscle memory needed to navigate vim. I've been a happy vim user for years now.
I can't explain it, but there is something about games that really reinforce this kind of learning.
Vim Adventures was so effective because it only lets you use the keys that it teaches you, and slowly expands the key set over time. Well worth the $25 if you want a guided introduction.
Nicky Case has a knack for explaining complex systems in simple ways through games
Wargaming is in general a good way to pick up information on historical topics. Most developers that are in that niche put a lot of effort into doing the research, and there is typically a lot of information baked into the in-game documentation at your fingertips, not to mention being a springboard for Wikipedia safaris.
My son loves Crusader Kings 2 (and EU3), and had such an easy time in his history class because of this. He knew the geography of Europe down cold.
He's currently digging into Hearts of Iron IV.
To be honest these grand strategy games aren't really my thing but I should give them a shot. Their systems just seem overwhelming to a new player.
you're also 100% correct regarding geography. it's hard to get a real feeling for exactly how huge asia is until you're having difficulty getting supply to your front line deep in northwestern china. not to mention that i have a pretty good feeling for where all of the tiny pacific islands are now (attu island, i'm looking at you).
I don't think its enough to actually learn language on its own, so it's best used mixed with a more formal method of language learning. It's fun and addictive enough that I actually keep using it, so that makes it good to me.
https://stories.duolingo.com
I started Chinese, and it just seems so much of a mish-mash - it's like they just randomise testing and eventually you glean enough from the test questions to answer.
With French the closest I've come to learning, that I can point to, is from users answers to comments from other user. And the good and bad are mixed, there's no clarity.
I appreciate the idea that the episodes are life stories instead of fake cafe scenes. The stories are interesting, and sometimes intense. The CEO / cofounder talks about a kidnapping in his family in the last episode of season one.
The small english summaries every few sentences helps provide context. That helps with context for the words I'm not familiar or strong with.
The language used is intermediate level. Personally I am below that level, but have gotten value from episodes.
An example of too much advertising having adverse effect, at least on me :p
pythonchallenge.com changed the course of my career and I'm grateful for it.
It teaches facts about all kinds of subjects hidden in a crossword-like game. Free to play, with IAP hints. 4.7 rating.
Just enough gamification, and enough straight concepts to allow me to build confidence quickly and make it a bit easier to remember the knobs flexbox offers.
Learn virtually any programming language by completing series of puzzles. Tests are all written for you. They just made a huge overhaul of their UX, and it’s really nice looking. I’m using it to try to learn Rust and Elixir at the moment.
Their new look is a lot less devilish. :)
Factorio does a decent job teaching the intuition behind running a factory.
https://github.com/dakaraphi/development-resources/blob/mast...
Minorly successful, fun atleast. I'd suggest it
It was a graphical dungeon in orange/black 512x512 where you used medicines to attack diseases. Medical students used it to learn pharmacology.
The PLATO network functionality predates much of the internet.
<<PLATO's most popular game, is one of the world's first MUDs and has over 1 million hours of use.[citation needed]. The games Doom and Quake can trace part of their lineage back to PLATO programmer Silas Warner.>>
If you try to go through his books encoding the puzzles and their solutions in Coq, then you'll learn quite a lot about Coq and constructive mathematics also.
Have you found it worthwhile to learn Coq?
Encoding (a subset of) the puzzles as SAT problems for something like z3 would be an alternative to Coq.