Grand Theft Auto IV is out, and once again players will get to drive virtual cars too fast, purposefully knock over digital pedestrians, get into computerized fist fights and commit a variety of other make-believe crimes. Lovely.

Luckily for parents, the game is rated M for Mature, meaning kids can't access it (unless a hapless older relative buys it for them). Anyway, concerned parents with an interest in their kids' education might prefer to guide them toward educational software on the shelves.

But gaming expert Nathon Gunn says that many of those games are terminally uninteresting for kids. "As a kid, I was handed all of these well-meaning CD ROMs or floppy disks," says Gunn. "Adults would say 'this will be really fun activity, kid', and I'd shake my head, thinking 'what do these old people think is fun?' "

Educational games traditionally came in the form of mundane quiz shows or branching narratives that took the player down a small number of predefined paths, says Gunn, who is CEO of Bitcasters, a new media production company. He launched the History Canada game after deciding that he could do better.

Gunn considered how to use games to seed an interest in history. "My perspective on a fun game involves changing the outcome," he says, arguing that enabling young people to become directly involved in manipulating history in a game gives them a personal investment in that history.

Developing computer games that will appeal to kids is difficult, and costly. Instead of doing it from scratch, he worked a deal with 2K, the owner of Civilization, a strategy game that lets players build their own society. Significantly, 2K is owned by Take Two -- which also owns the much less cerebral GTA series.

Bitcasters produced an add-on pack for Civilization that enabled children to strategically manipulate the history of Canada in the mid-1500s. In this way, they could play out 'what-if' scenarios, such as the French retaining the whole of Canada, or the Huron displacing the five-nations confederacy.

Other educational games are designed for play online. Whyville, for example, is a game that originated in the U.S. but which has a strong Canadian following, particularly among girls aged eight to 12.

Its creator, James Bower, is a computational neurobiologist who managed a program at Caltech for 17 years to try to bolster pre-college science education. One aspect of that initiative focused on using digital technology to support education, and he became interested in using virtual online environments to teach children in the late eighties. He founded Numedeon, the publisher of Whyville, in 1998.

"It was designed to engage kids in a co-ordinated, organized way and then motivate them to carry out various activities and projects in the Whyville environment," he says, adding that two thirds of the 3.5 million children in Whyville are directly involved in educational activities while the other third are discussing it.

Whyville is available online at www.whyville.net, while you can read more about the History Canada game at www.historicanada.com.

Source: canada.com