Purpose Games is a free service for creating and or playing simple educational games. The service currently gives users the ability to create seven types of games. Those game types are image quizzes, text quizzes, matching games, fill-in-the-blank games, multiple choice games, shape games, and slide games.

Text quizzes, matching games, fill-in-the-blank, and multiple choice games are all rather self-explanatory. The other games require a little bit of explanation. Image quizzes made on Purpose Games are activities in which players click on an image to identify the answer to a question. As the game creator you add small dots to an image to provide answer choices. The shape games on Purpose Games are similar to image quizzes with the difference being that you can use a freehand drawing tool to identify parts of an image. That’s how this map game was made. Slide games is a new, still in beta, game style on Purpose Games. In slide games multiple questions in slide format rather than all questions appearing on one screen.

Applications for Education
Purpose Games has been around for years. In fact, I first started using it with my students ten years ago. I bring that up to say that while it might not be the fanciest looking site, it has staying power. I used it with my freshmen world geography students as a way to, you guessed it, review countries and their capitals. I used the “playlist” function on Purpose Games to put together lists of games to share with my students. Sharing a link to a playlist is a better way of getting your students to a set of games than just telling them to find game X or game Y in the massive library of Purpose Games.