Ask HN: What games are your kids learning the most from?

My kids play tag (and any number of other things) outside. Teaches them about fitness, coordination, perseverance, social dynamics, how to engage people they don’t know.

They do play some digital games but I wouldn’t go so far as to say they learn anything useful from them.

My nine year old has been using Minecraft education edition, Swift Playgrounds and Lego Boost to figure out programming. In Swift, he figures out structure and concepts, in Boost it is the interactions with the sensors and in Minecraft he puts it all together to make traps, contraptions and just experiment.

From my personal experience of being a kid, Factorio.

In the beginning, it could teach you resourcefulness, design and some quick math.

You can make it complicated when you start using circuits in the game. You have signals, combinators, etc to make your factory more efficient.

Depends how old/mature your kids are.

My eldest was a reluctant reader, so a rpi with retropie, with lots of old games - no voiceovers, all text on-screen. Pokemon Firered/Leafgreen Throwback was the one the really worked the best for us: https://www.pokecommunity.com/showthread.php?t=285094 - but Monkey Island is also working well.

https://duncanlock.net/tag/speedrunning-computer-games-histo...

Khan academy for kids. It's wonderfully educational,suitable for a broad range of ages, and large range of high quality content. We might not consider it a 'game' per se but my kids have limited enough experience with apps that this definately qualifies.

My daughters are 10 and 7 this year. The 10-year-old loves making treasure hunts (and has for a while). She scatters clues on little pieces of paper all over the house and garden. Some clues are ambiguous, so the wrong locations will also contain surprises, e.g. a note under the apple tree saying "Nearly! But where else would you find apples?" (fruit drawer in fridge). I'd love to get her started on Escape Rooms soon. The little one loves twisting existing games. Like connect-4: you can play two tokens on your turn. Or Chess: making up new movement rules for the pieces. They're learning to be rule breakers and outside-the-box thinkers.

My son loved the simplified Dungeons & Dragons board games. He learned addition, subtraction, multiplication and probability. The storytelling was very important in keeping him engaged. I also would allow him to create items on note cards to practice writing. Strategy also becomes very important for big encounters. Anyway the board games take a significant amount of time to setup so we are playing Baldur's Gate 3 together now.

Mario 64 taught my kid how to think through problems and eventually encouraged him to start reading. Baba Is You took that problem solving to another level.

I'm 25 yo. From 6 to 13 Pokemon then Minecraft since 2012. I learnt a lot from these games, from patience to perseverance, from just finishing to speedrunning games. And 9 years ago I started to play chess, now I'm in the top 5% world, the strategy behind it looks impressive but this is especially about your knowledges.

Kerbal space program and empire of the undergrowth. Minecraft has proven interesting as well.