Educational online games

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“Let’s play brain surgery!” said my young friend Gabriel, 9, excitedly. “Yeah, brain surgery!” chimed in his sister, seven-year-old Madeleine. Good grief, I thought. These kids have a twisted sense of fun—or else they’re nascent neurosurgeons.

But it turns out Gabriel isn’t necessarily the next Sanjay Gupta, nor does he have an unaccountable fascination for cutting people’s heads open.

Brain surgery—or, to be more precise, Deep Brain Stimulation Surgery—is one of myriad online “games” that Gabriel was introduced to in his fourth grade computer class at P.S. 3, in Greenwich Village. The game is found at edheads.org, a nonprofit educational website that’s home to eight other activities.

Players learn that their patient, 59-year-old Ellen, has Parkinson’s disease, a movement disorder. By carefully drilling into her skull and inserting stimulation probes, they can minimize Ellen’s symptoms. This is no souped-up version of Operation—kids learn the exact steps required to perform the procedure, and the reasons for each of them. Animation prevents the experience from becoming too graphic, and a video of a real-life patient shows the before-and-after results.

If your kid’s not quite ready for surgery, she can pretend instead to be an engineer designing a cell phone for senior citizens. Players read research provided by the client (determining, for example, that seniors don’t require phones with long battery life or multiple functions, but do need large, easy-to-use keys) and work with a budget and various tools to design a product. Once the prototype is finished, the kids listen to an animated focus group discuss what they do and don’t like about it. For younger kids, there’s the Compound Machine—a fun journey through a series of cause-and-effect sequences meant to teach children the principles of such forces as gravity, friction and kinetic energy. For example, gravity moves a marble toward a mousetrap, the marble releases the trap’s spring, and the energy of the uncoiling spring sets the trap off.

Gabriel also likes physicsgames.net, which, as the name implies, features scores of activities focused on the principles of motion. One, called Colliderix (try playing it below), challenges the player to strategically remove obstacles in the path of a moving ball in order to make it collide with a like-colored orb. Another favorite, Bubblebox.com, offers logic diversions: In Rescue a Chicken, kids move bales of hay to help little chicks land safely in their nest; Easy Joe players unlock doors and manipulate levers, propelling a rabbit-like character over rivers and into adventures.

Sure, Gabriel is still enamored with Mario and Luigi, and cow racing for the Wii is a perennial favorite. But his comparable enjoyment of games involving logic, patience and strategy—not to mention words like subthalamic nucleus—is the online equivalent of a kid liking broccoli as much as pepperoni pizza.