Heating Plastics

Link: http://nobelprize.org/educational_games/chemistry/plastics/index.html

I like the little animation at the beginning that explains the plastic making process. The concept of the game is also really amusing (making plastic ducks) which would probably keep kids playing with it.

The little plastic duck introduces you to how plastics are made. You get a random assortment of 6 plastic items and you have to determine whether you can melt them or not. When you select an item, it gives a brief description of the item, the polymer bonds and a couple facts on how we use that sort of plastic. Once you determine whether it can melt, your cursor turns into a flame and you get to try to melt the plastic. If you're right, you get a catalyst. After all 6 items, you make a duck, the size of which is determined by the number of catalysts you were awarded.



Good:
The duck is funny, often adding jokes in with the text
Able to skip the intro
I like trying to melt things on your own. It adds another sort of amusing interaction



Needs work:
I stopped reading the descriptions after I realized that when the polymers looked like "cold spaghetti" it was meltable, and when they were "cross-linked" it wasn't. I think it was a good concept, but this easy trick made me stop working at it. I would generally say a trick like this wasn't necessarily a bad thing, but it made the game too trivial.