![]() ![]() Sulfur’s Night Lab gives a recommended age range of 9 and up, but I’d imagine the target audience is closer to late middle school. This is what a laboratory looks like… right? Sulfur has team of freaky assistants who each specialize in a different type of matter, like acids, bases, and metals, and they have activities to complete that require your knowledge about chemicals and their physical properties, how they interact with other compounds, and how they’re used in everyday life. Sulfur’s lab by solving chemistry problems that conveniently tie into the game’s learning objectives. Sulfur, whose extravagantly designed science lab (resembling what an elementary school kid imagines a cool science lab looks like) has been attacked by a horde of genetically engineered mutants (sure!). In this game, you’ve been drafted to help the mysterious Dr. And to achieve that, the designers tried to recreate the joy of playing around in science class. ![]() Released by textbook publisher McGraw-Hill’s short-lived computer game division in 1996, Dr. Sulfur’s Night Lab might be the most ambitious science edutainment game I’ve ever encountered. But compared to math games that can infinitely generate math problems, there’s only so many types of unique investigations or experiments that developers can reasonably fit into one science game.īy that measure, Dr. This is, I think, the right way to do it. Last year, I talked about MECC’s Science Inquiry Collection, which taught scientific subjects - like water quality or dental health - through an investigative process. It’s more challenging for an educational game to reproduce the value of an exercise like that. In fourth grade, my science teacher did an experiment where we had to identify sugar, salt, and flour by taste alone, and as hokey as that was, it’s stuck with me for two decades, so he must have been onto something. The best science lessons are the ones where students get to mix liquids together or play with magnets or set things on fire. Language arts are a good fit for a computer game too, because it’s another reproducible subject that mostly happens on paper.Ĭompare that with science, a subject that benefits so much from hands-on experimentation that a computer game can’t necessarily supply. The math action-adventure game Troggle Trouble Math, for example, can automatically spin up an endless number of story problems by plugging numbers into a handful of templates. Looking at a sample of edutainment games from the 80s and 90s, I’m willing to say that a large portion of them are about math, maybe because math is easier to randomly generate. Science is a tough subject for an educational game. Sulfur’s Night Lab, courtesy of Stuart Feldhamer via MobyGames. These user designed simulations combine both text based instructions and the simulation into a single distributable file.Box art for Dr. ![]() ![]() Users can expand upon the original lab set using ChemLab's LabWizard development tools, thus allowing for curriculum specific lab simulation development by educators. Users step-through the actual lab procedure while interacting with animated equipment in a way that is similar to the real lab experience.ĬhemLab comes with a range of pre-designed lab experiments for general chemistry at the high school and college level. Commonly used lab equipment and procedures are used to simulate the steps involved in performing an experiment. Model ChemLab is a unique product incorporating both an interactive simulation and a lab notebook workspace with separate areas for theory, procedures and student observations. It has continued to be developed with extensive input from educators interested in the possible application of computer simulations for classroom and distance learning. CHEMLAB GAME SOFTWAREChemLab originated from academic work in computer simulation and software design at McMaster University. ![]()
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