From Scot Osterweil - The designer of the Zoombinis series

When the Zoombinis' publisher (The Learning Company) asked if I could design a Zoombinis game about science I had to stop and think.

Although the Zoombinis games were ostensibly about math and logic, I had come to believe that they were also about science. In a Zoombinis game one encounters strange and seemingly opaque phenomena. Through a process of experimentation that starts with conjecture and builds to reasoned hypotheses, one gradually makes sense of these phenomena until one can understand and harness them to achieve goals. What's more, players arrive at this "scientific method" at their own developmentally appropriate pace.

Although the games never explicitly say, "you're acting like a scientist," it is my hope that the habits of mind the player develops with the Zoombinis will stay with them throughout their lives. This kind of learning, the exercising of the mind to build intellectual muscle is what I want in all our games. Indeed this kind of work is far more important to me than imparting scientific facts. So what would a Zoombinis game about science do that the existing games didn't already do?

It then occurred to me that along with scientific thinking, in our increasingly technological society people need more exposure to the workings of the natural world. And so maybe it was possible to create a game that wouldn't "teach" science, but would have scientific themes threaded throughout its stories and puzzles as a way of sparking curiosity.

And so I tried to incorporate the real world throughout Zoombinis Island Odyssey, from the grand theme of ecology and life cycles that informs the game story, to more particular processes like pollination, plant anatomy, genetics or the phases of the moon that appear in individual puzzles.

Although I would love it if everyone who plays the game walks away with a solid mental model of lunar mechanics (for one example), it is far more important to me that every player walks away with a clearer sense that the world is full of intriguing, complex, and beautiful processes, any one of which can offer real stimulation and satisfaction when paid attention to. If this sense of the world leads a child to pay more attention to rocks, or bicycle gears, or worms, the game will be as successful as if the same child has mastered the specific concepts the game introduces.
 .