Indie developer Daryl Hornsby has a novel approach for getting kids engaged with educational games: Don’t dumb things down.
That’s the key to Machineers, the clever puzzle-adventure game his company crafted to to lead kids through various programming logic concepts.
“When you say you want to target 10 to 15 year-olds, you’re told you have to make it overly colorful and bubbly, and that no kids read text,” Hornsby told Cult of Mac. “We’ve been able to prove that this is not quite the case. We’ve found that kids want to be treated like adults, but it still has to be approachable.”