What’s A Questionaut? It’s This Week’s Tweak!

What’s that you say? The Weekly Tweaks are supposed to be a MONDAY feature, and this is Wednesday night?? Oh dear. Um. Right. Would you believe me if I told you that in some isolated cultures, Monday falls on random weekdays?

Never mind all that, we have neurons to workout. For your brain-boosting pleasure, we proudly point you towards:

Questionaut!
(popup blockers off, please)

Produced for the BBC by the talented folks at Amanita Designs, Questionaut is a gorgeous point-and-click Flash game that is definitely time well spent. The quiz is aimed the Tweener age group, but unless you’ve recently been through refresher courses on fifth grade writing, math, and science, you may find yourself having to think about some of the answers.

(I actually missed one…. erm… Ok, I missed five. But I was busy admiring the animation and interactivity, dang it. I wasn’t paying attention… It doesn’t count! I demand a do-over!)

(Ahem. Ok, I’m better now)

But it’s not the quiz itself that I wanted to draw attention to - more important to note is how the game designers cleverly engage several learning styles, as well as different parts of the brain.

The story line, music, visuals, and motion each bring different areas of the brain into play. The point-and-click puzzle aspects bring action into the process. And the “quiz” (which includes language, math, and science questions) is only part of the brain workout. To get to each mini-quiz, you have to solve interactive puzzles, with no guidance or help — and many of them require (and teach) practical knowledge of applied science. And there is no obvious, familiar or simple means of navigation - you have to work it out on your own, with no hints or instructions.

It’s a serious step forward for educational games.

Links?

For more beautiful games & graphics: Amanita Designs
To launch the game from the BBC web site: BBC Questionaut
For more educational games from the BBC: BiteSize Games

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MindTweak: Originality: It does a brain good.

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