I've spent many hours with the family playing MineCraft, and it's an amazing way to teach things like not being selfish, being cooperative, etc. to children because they experience the effects or lack of in compacted real time without permanent real-world impact.
Their joke grew out if conversations that went something like this:
Son blurts obscure historical factoid.
Me: "Where the hell did you learn that?!"
Son names video game he learned it from. Punchline: "Video games are our only education." (Vin Diesel movie line, so another excellent reason to say it to me.)
They now have a blog where that's the descriptor, basically.
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My son was already a gamer. He hated his typing program. I told him he could quit doing practice typing as one of his assignments if he exceeded 35wpm -- which is my typical typing speed and I had a typing class in high school and can type about 60wpm when I am focused and yadda.
I also told him online gaming was a known way to hit a better speed and that's likely a factor in him going that route. He was gleefully happy to give up typing practice as one of his formal lessons.
> He hated his typing program.
I remember those typing practice programs. I always hated them. Super boring, couldn't stand them for more than 2 minutes.
Much later on (and well after I've achieved high typing speeds) I've discovered The Typing of The Dead - a House of The Dead clone where you shoot zombies by correctly typing words. For me, that was the ultimate typing program: it gave the same exercises, but in the context where I could spend hours in front of it. I suppose that was an early form of what we know today as "gamification".
I was very goal oriented. If they could meet the standard, they could move on to do something else instead. Where they exceeded grade level expectations across the board for some subject, I let them do whatever they felt like doing as "gifted enrichment."
For science, I got my oldest anything he was interested in -- books to read, magazine subscriptions, whatever he wanted -- because at age 13 he was talking slow and repeating himself a lot to explain the Theory of Relativity to me. This was enormously helpful in getting me through some of my later upper class college classes.