play-n-learn: educational games in the internet

I think that Porto Editora and other educational material publishers already offer educational games on the internet, but they normally aren't free or at least are too expensive to have enough people trying them and being successfully adopted enough to be able to reap the benefits of the social web. Other kind of sites simply offer free access to flash games, but these aren't educational in a strict sense cause they don't help children learn about things such as geometry, language, drawing, etc. Normally these games help children get acquainted with computers (mouse and keyboard) and they help with some aspects of cognitive learning. Nevertheless, they aren't the kind of thing that a sensible parent would want his child to occupy much of his time.

With TopCoder for finding specialized individuals for game development and having a good educational team providing the educational content seal we would be able to create some uniformity in the site's offer and at the same time enough traffic for paying the content due to Google AdWords and Google AdSense. Creating enough traffic is the key for having a sustainable site if there are enough clicks in the adds. I think this would be possible because parents buy lots of stuff for their kids.

One thing we should try to guarantee is that the adds have some geographical sense. This means that Google should work its magic and that the site should face localization correctly and coherently. Maybe in the start simply offering for Portugal, Spain, Brazil and USA. Customers from Algarve should have adds that are relevant for them. This might require that users are registered, enabling the site to provide relevant adds and even enabling Google Adds to do its job better.

Some tech details:

• main site developed in Google appengine and Clojure
• flash games (downloaded from AWS, but with communication back into main site for coordination and management)
• make a semantic system that allows to interconnect both the games and the site (artificial intelligence and Semantic Web and ontology) using REST.