In NeuroMatrix, the most recent videogame developed by Morphonix LLC, a software company based in California, you play a secret agent infiltrating a neuroscience research facility. Your mission: understand why scientists can’t communicate anymore. You track down the Nanobots that have invaded their brains. If you fail, the Nanobots and the secret entity that spawned them will take over the Earth, reprogramming the human brain into docile submission.

This NIH-funded action videogame not only has 11 to 14 year-old kids play in a 3D real-time environment, but it has them learn about how their brain works at the same time.

Aware of the new generation of teachers willing to introduce high technologies into their classrooms, software companies and education researchers are creating powerful tools that introduce kids to new concepts, have them ask deeper questions and even have them learn how to think. But there might be a risk that educational videogames never make it into schools.

You’d imagine that videogames would be the last thing teachers would want to introduce into their classrooms. Since their field exploded and got even bigger than the cinema industry, they have been stereotyped as electronic junk food dangerous for the kids’ brains development.

Nevertheless in the past six years, educational videogames have become respected methods of teaching in new ways. Research papers lauding their values, both in the cognitive sciences and in the educational fields have appeared. In 2005, 100 experts even met at a Federation of American Scientists summit to discuss ways to accelerate the development for new educational digital games and have videogames developers work in collaboration with research labs.

Most educators agree that children learn more when they are engaged in an active environment. In that sense, educational videogames value the so-called “constructionist” learning theories defined in the 1980’s to the National Science Foundation by Seymour Papert. He explained that constructionists view learning as a rebuilding of knowledge by the kids rather than as a transmission from the teacher to the pupils.

Logical puzzles games, for example, follow the “constructionist” theory. They can have children assimilate new concepts. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Education Arcade group has developed a videogame for middle-school-age children funded by the U.S. Department of Education, that has the children learn math and literacy. Kids start to play when entering a mysterious underground factory. Through comic strip storytelling, players learn that they will have to solve a series of logical puzzles to free the pets that were kidnapped by the monsters in the factory. They win the game once they solve every puzzle.

One puzzle, for example, introduces the concept of variables. When the player opens one of the 100 doors of the Labyrinth, she arrives in front of a vending machine. After she tests the virtual environment to understand how to solve the puzzle, she sees that when three pink coins equal three, three green equal six, and a combination of two pink and one green equals four. “The value for each color changes every time you reload the game,” explains Scot Osterweil, creative director at the Education Arcade. That puzzle is solved once the player finds the correct combination to get all the food out of the vending machine.

Videogames also close the gap between what kids learn at school and real life. In Neuromatrix, the very act of playing a “Memory Puzzle” models how a memory is constructed in the brain. Karen Littman, president of Morphonix LLC, explains that they have developed the first videogame that has the kids use their brain and learn about it simultaneously. And she goes further: “the kids will engage some parts of their own brains, and learn about their specific function at the very moment they play it.”

When some approaches introduce new concepts to kids, others strengthen the students’ knowledge on one specific subject. Making History is a simulation computer game developed by Muzzy Lane Inc.. a sofware company based in Massachusetts, that engages high school students in the challenges of World War II. They play the leaders of more than 80 countries and build up strategies relying on what they know about the historical context of World War II.

Winning isn’t the most important in the game. Students apply economic, diplomatic and military policies. When they make decisions on alliances, an indicator on their screen shows the countries’ rank, a combat report and what national and international events followed as a consequence. Sarah Grafman, education director at Muzzy Lane Inc., explains that they worked with historians and researchers to develop the game as realistic as possible. “But [students] can choose to have the US ignore the War in Europe and invade South America. They’ll see the direct effects of that decision,” she adds.

Other computer simulations will have players step back and think about how they have learned. David Williamson Shaffer, associate professor at the University of Wisconsin, develops what he calls epistemic games.. Those videogames aim to teach kids to think like engineers, journalists, or lawyers. He explains that simulated worlds, if well constructed, are not just about facts, but embody particular social practices. In the “Urban Science” game for example, players use an urban planer software to solve some of the city problems. The idea isn’t to have them become the profession they play, but to learn those professions’ particular ways of thinking.

However, those emerging studies face a challenge: no real measures show educational videogames efficiency. As frustrating as it might be, according to John Rice, researcher at the University of North Texas, nobody even knows what parameter to measure. It seems that to fit today’s standardized school system, videogames should provide teachers with reports reading the students’ scores, just as in regular knowledge school tests. But the makers of those games are not trying to adapt to the actual school system. They would rather change it.