You can probably guess from the conflation of entertainment with education in the article: > Buckleitner, who has been reviewing educational games since 1984,

You can probably guess from the conflation of entertainment with education in the article: > Buckleitner, who has been reviewing educational games since 1984, assured me of their quality. “They were good!” he said. “They had animation, music… for the first time you had actors speaking, kind of like comic books. They teach higher order thinking, so they fit well with school curricula.” That I never thought about it means they were doing their job. Personally, I never felt I learned much from TLC games as a kid (although I enjoyed some games), and what I did learn I could've learned as well or better reading books or doing regular exercises. In general, educational and brain-training games don't work, likewise, handing out laptops, and the better the experiment you run, the smaller the effects are. (This is true of education experiments in general, where effects are typically near zero.) Just because something is entertaining doesn't mean it's educational, and just because something is educational, doesn't mean it's more educational than what a kid would otherwise be doing, or educational about useful things.