Spybotics

Over on the Lego site, there's a tactical combat game called Spybotics: The Nightfall Incident that is surprisingly deep from both a gameplay and a story perspective, and also very polished.

The gameplay hinges on using programs to hack into network nodes, using each program's strengths to gain different advantages on the battlefield. The storyline, even early on, brings in a mystery of sorts, where you don't know who to trust, despite the simple yes/no dialogue interface. For a promotional online game aimed at kids, the game creators really pulled out all the stops. I'm not sure I'd call it educational, but it certainly does challenge the player to think critically and plan ahead. Pretty impressive.

These are the caliber of games that small production houses can create to good effect, I think. I haven't seen a postmortem on this game, but I suspect it was a small team working for a month or two. There's nothing there that isn't accessible to a reasonably skilled Director or Flash programmer, so educational games like this could probably be produced without too much pain.