Point & Click¶

I, like many of my peers have fond memories of the point and click adventures of our youth. "Day of the Tentacles", "The Secret of Monkey Island", "Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis" to name a few.

They were easy to play, colourful and entertaining. and over the weekend a thought was distilled from the miasma of my point and click nostalgia.

Could point and click adventures be used to allow the players to not be entertained but also to be educated along the way?

I'm an ocassional mentor but no teacher, but I am often struck both in my personal learning and whilst mentoring that the best, stickiest learning occurs through doing. If the doing is entertaining and aligns with the doer's interests it can going beyond learning directly into a self driven thirst for more.

So could we build point and click adventures that require the players to learn and act on those learnings in the real world. To use the non-linear nature of a good point and click to allow the student (for want of a better word) to follow their own passions?

I'm sure this has already by tried but perhaps not for the topics I was thinking about: Coding, Electronics. Effectively Making.

There are a bunch of great modern, and in some cases open source point and click engines out there that could be leverages. I even remember seeing one written in Python used to make commercial games (PyVida). Although it does look like it hasn't had a huge amount of attention for a while.

I wonder if an interpreter could be bundled into the engine itself that would allow students to apply their knowledge to coding problems in a secure manner?

And yes, for the record I know this would be a crap load of work and as such is going onto my long list of "great ideas" that will likely never happen.

Links:

Oh, and I want the avatar to be a Quokka called Quentin. Obviously.