Educational games, but more advanced

[JoAuSc]

I have fond memories of playing educational games back when I was young (~10 years ago), like Mutanoid Math Challenge, Operation Neptune, Gazillionaire, and so on. They had these wacky, colorful premises like facing off in a math contest against weird-looking aliens so that Earth wouldn't get drenched in slime. (In this game the math contest consisted of solving simple algebraic equations, arithmetic, that sort of thing; grade-school stuff.)

Are there any games for college-level math?

(I mean games that are inherently entertaining, but where solving math problems (or physics problems, or something like that) is crucial.)

I remember doing searches a few times for games like these, but couldn't find anything. I'm thinking about something like an upgraded version of Operation Neptune. The original game consisted of you moving about in a sub, collecting artifacts and having to solve math problems that pop up to either move to the next level or open up something, problems that had to do with submarine stuff like

"Your sub is leaking fuel at 2 liters/hour. If you currently have 40 liters of fuel, in how many hours will your sub be out of fuel?"

The upgraded version would have question like

"Let x(t) be the amount of fuel in liters in your sub. Your tank is leaking fuel at a rate of dx1/dt = k*x liters per hour, and your engine uses up fuel at a rate of dx2/dt = 5 liter/hour. You currently have 40 liters of fuel, and your engine will fail once x < 1 liter of fuel. Determine how long your sub can last with its engine on."

Obviously, you'd need a pencil, paper, and a calculator, but I think a lot of people would like a game like this.

 

[eax]

A game like that. I would preffer to just have questions in the textbooks like that. unfortunately I don't think there exists educational games for higher level. Zelda would be like

oh no monster apeared ... This monster may be approximated as a long W254x23x3. if the beam compresses in 1ms due to a hit of the sword, how hard should link hit the monster to have enough energy to give the princess a visit for a cup of coffee?

I would like some sort of educational game too.

 

[Ki Man]

I don't think a typical gamer would want to do relativistic calculations while playing rogue squadron

 

[slugcountry]

its not what you're looking for, but Orbiter is an insanely detailed and ultra realistic space flight simulation - I'm sure if you want you can work out your own problems involving orbital mechanics and then see if they work in "real life".

http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/

just a thought =)

 

[gravenewworld]

a good drinking game at the bar with you and your friends is counting out loud from 1 on upwards and skipping all the prime numbers. whenever a number comes up with the same digit like 11 or 22 the you switch the direction in which you count. who ever messed up obviously has to drink. after a few rounds of beers we can never get past 22-23.

 

[moe darklight]

I have a game called "professor fizzwizzle"... it's not really math problems, it's more to do with logic and strategy, but some levels are pretty challenging to figure out. And you can always go online and download user-made levels, some of those can be very hard to figure out.