Educational / Serious Games on Steam?

[GromitJK]

I think it would be a great idea, to add a special channel for serious games. Something like "SteamEDUCATION", just like what Apple did with the Appstore. More and more educators see the potential of gamebased learning and are using serious games in schools. Also parents might be interested in buying high quality games for their kids.

It would also be good in terms of serious games quality (which can definately be improved in most cases ;-) to have them all together, rated and commented by a critical community.

What is your opinion? Are there people in the Steam community who would be interested in something like that?

[bargain]

This idea intrigues me. As someone who took some pedagogy classes and someone who loves games, I always wished educative games could be more widespread in schools, specially here in Brazil. Also, Valve has always promoted[www.teachwithportals.com] this kind of thing, so I don't think they would oppose.

But I think that this sub-store should focus less on individual buyers and more on bulk sales. Steam could enter in contact with some Serious Games developers and, if they are willing, add their games in a section where schools and other institutions could buy these games for cheap, maybe even free, depending on the situation.

[GoodGravy]

Necroing this thread because I think this is a very important direction for Valve to move in. Why not take a bite out of the iOS-dominated educational market? For fear or alienating hardcore gamers? I doubt it. As long as reading instruction doesn't compete for "front-page" real estate with the games people expect of Steam, there should be no problem whatsoever in terms of mixing disparate audiences. Perhaps an alternate overlay like what Netflix-for-Kids has done.

Anyway, disappointed not to be able to find a single shred of educational software for my toddler on Steam, and ended up here while looking.