I know this is fairly old, but I've been thinking about the "pedagogy of games" and how potent they can be to help people arrive at intuitive understanding of things. They can be something between play and lecture, and be their own thing at that. You provide the player with a series of challenges, each with a context and some mechanics, and the player has to explore and learn the consequences and applications of these mechanics to proceed, or at least get a good intuition about them. The game can then progressively challenge and re-contextualize this intuition. I do think the secret is to let them be real games. I'm thinking about making a puzzle game dealing with some sorts of dynamical systems, and I'll be taking a look at the games in your list to prepare, so thanks for it : )
That sounds interesting. It’s good to hear someone else thinking of entering the ‘real educational games’ space, and I wish you luck. I really need to remake this video since I’ve stopped updating the list and decided to focus more on making 1 game rather than a lot of little ones. My mission’s the same, but the details are out of date.