CJR and I have been playing a game that her dad worked on, Thinkport’s fantastic The Lure of the Labyrinth. I’d come across the game before and never got into it, but on the second go round, I can’t stop playing. It’s supposed to be for ~5th grade kids in math class, there’s a lot of pattern recognition and arithmetic. Games that are explicitly “educational” usually aren’t that interesting to kids, but remove that “educational” tag, and you’ve got kids at at least one Chicago Public Library absolutely loving Labyrinth (CJR, worried about the silly games that the kids in the branch she’s working at were playing on the library computers, introduced them to Labyrinth. It was, and still is, a hit). The game doesn’t need to be played in a classroom, you can just sign up with a Thinkport account and go. It’s also Flash, so no downloading files necessary (except for, ah, Flash). There are some tedious parts and I wish the user had keyboard control of the character, but these are small issues. I’d recommend checking it out yourself and telling the kids you know about it.
[Image is a screenshot from one of the first narrative sections of the game.]