Educational gaming failed a while ago, still developers keep trying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E7iWYXnf8s

A study done in the Netherlands by the dutch ministery of education concluded that using educational gamification misses the mark. At the the turn of the eighties to somewhere in the middle nineties, every dutch classroom counted a computer or two with on it educational software that tried to teach different fields in the hopes that math and other disciplines could be taught by play. It does not do entirely away with gamification, as it does have it uses (Making boring tasks less boring for instance.), but essentially it was concluded that kids remembered the game-elements over what the game was trying to teach. That is, the message got lost between cute characters and talking digits. Now, computers largely collect dust and new insights now prevail, like the discovery that kids studying in groups actually teach eachother. (Yes, who would've thunk.)

A very good indicator is the game that Jim Sterling is handling in the video. The game tries to teach kids about the horrors of the slavetrade in history and misses the mark completely and spectacularly. While the game does do it's best to instill upon the kid playing the horror of it all, next to fits of spastic laughter I got the notion that it wasn't so bad afterall. It seems to be that everything was perfectly reasonable and the people involved were all fine gentlemen with no other agenda than turning a profit.

How different the developers could've gone about it I wouldn't know. I'm not a teacher, not am I particularly knowledgable in how to present topics in a way that sticks to kids in a classroom environment. What I do know that this game teaches little anecdotal facts that has little to do with slavetrade between mini-games that make me scratch my head. But see the video for yourself and learn that the slavetrade was actually quite funny and not so bad at all.