[maket]

I haven't played it yet, but I've played several of Zachtronics games in the past.

They generally don't teach you technologies that exist in the real world. Real-world concepts are usually just used as a way to make the mechanics of the game more accessible (Spacechem and KOHCTPYKTOP are good examples of this)

However, their games are very programming-centric, having programming skills makes them much more accessible. Their game TIS-100 is literally just assembly programming on a made-up architecture. I wouldn't call them "educational games", but they're certainly very mentally involved.

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Spacechem: http://www.zachtronics.com/spacechem/

KOHCTPYKTOP: http://www.zachtronics.com/kohctpyktop-engineer-of-the-peopl...

TIS-100: http://www.zachtronics.com/tis-100/

[Nullabillity]

IMO, it's much more important to teach the underlying concepts than it is to teach how to use the framework of the month.

Zachtronics games tend to take an important programming concept and distills it to a really fun and challenging core.

[drivers99]

KOHCTPYKTOP seemed like building things with transistors should work about the same way, but I've only built things with logic gates (and that, only a little). Could you not actually build circuits the way you do in the game? I've actually been thinking of buying a few thousands of transistors (2N3904) (and resistors as needed, which aren't used in the game) to see how far I could get building a (tiny) computer.

[abecedarius]

It is close to real CMOS circuits, but idealized -- I don't remember all the idealizations (and I'm really not an expert), but e.g. it'd accept a solution that depends on a race condition working out deterministically.

[qwertyuiop924]

They teach you and allow you to practice skills highly relevant to programming.