In 2002, when I was 6 years old my father got me a series of CD-ROMs called Peris & Katia. They were a series of educational games with different themes, e.g school, sports, the Olympics, and they always featured two heroes, Peris (the dog) and Katia (the cat).

The games were very visually attractive to me as a child and they also included interactive elements such as animations, on-click sounds, narration and constructive feedback.

Looking back now, these games were very ahead of their time and had a high educational value for me. 

By spending hours after school playing those games, I enhanced my fine motor skills by learning to be precise with the mouse, I learned basic computer functionality and how to handle devices such as the keyboard, I developed my creativity skills by engaging in coloring or designing activities inside the game,and problem-solving skills by dealing with puzzles, memory games and word-Hangman. Lastly, I also practiced basic discipline skills, such as mathematical operations. And all these whilst having a blast! 

Even until this day, I have not had any other experiences with educational games that have shaped my learning at this extent.

Below I present a collection of pictures from some of the mini-games:

This seems like a very controversial answer, because Age of Empires is not an educational software, nor its creators had ever intended it to be used educationally, as the head designer mentioned in an interview here.

The main logic behind the Standard Game, was that each player started the game in a primitive state in their (ancient) civilization, and the goal was to develop their civilization's economy in the quickest/most efficient way to conquer the enemy (and avoid getting conquered in the process). The game had a graduated level of difficulty which made the opponent stronger and "smarter".

I used to play this game with my father in my primary school days and still continue playing it to this day.

I consider it as a very influential game that had an educational value for me, because I think that it helped me develop strategic thinking, adaptability and balance between tasks (and obstacles) in order to achieve a goal.

I specifically remember, as a child, repetitively losing the game and getting very frustrated because I could not grasp the tactics of the game, I was hyper-focusing on one aspect of my civilization, e.g fixing the buildings and not developing the others e.g gathering enough gold. I also could not foresee all the obstacles that were coming, so I wasn't properly prepared to meet them. After many loses, I had to rethink and adapt my strategies (maybe that was the beginning of my metacognition journey too!), I had to calculate my moves more carefully, identify my civilization's strengths and weaknesses and be more efficient. Lastly, I had the extrinsic motivation of beating my father in the game which assisted my learning!

*At this point, I will note that even though the main concept of the game is historical, I don't think that I learned history through the game, and it's no secret that the AoE series have been characterized many times as historically inaccurate. It does give though a very generic and overly simplified glimpse into ancient civilizations which did spark my interest into researching more about them. 

However, as can be seen below, times are changing and AoE IV is now actually used in educational contexts!

Last but not least, the computer has been the most influential gadget for me without a doubt. I have been an active user since primary school, but it became a part of my daily life around the 1st grade of lower secondary school when I had my first laptop (my sibling's old laptop). I remember discovering the world of forums and of science fiction stories, which were my interest at the time. Since then I've been using my laptop for all sorts of things, from searching information to creating content, to expressing myself, to communicating. It has supported mainly my informal learning in many different aspects, but also my formal learning as I got older, especially in the years of my bachelor's studies.

I have used Scratch both as a learner and as a teacher. I consider it as a cognitive tool because I think that it enhances computational thinking as well as creativity.

When I was teaching Robotics & Coding to primary students, I used it in lessons both as a main tool but also in combination with robot construction.

Some examples of the latter are shown on the right.

1) The students first constructed a steering wheel with the Lego WeDo 2.0 educational package using instructions, and then they created a car racing game in Scratch where they had to program the robot's tilt sensor, so that when they turned the wheel with their hands, the car in the game would change direction. I had pre-created some features of the game and urged them to experiment with different programming blocks. The goal of this process was to support their learning of the tilt sensor as well as to introduce them to variables. 

2) I had set a theme for the lesson about creating art with robots, so the students first constructed a spinning machine, again with Lego WeDo 2.0 and instructions. Then, they programmed it using Scratch. Many students experimented further with Scratch and tried to create a game where the character painted circles simultaneously with the robot. 

FrogFall Game - A multidisciplinary game about velocity in physics

Link: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/593744780 

Finally, Google Docs & Slides, even though they are also productivity tools, have both been very useful for me in collaborative brainstorming and problem-solving, especially because in most of the group projects that I have done, collaboration has happened remotely, so a shared doc or presentation really facilitated this process. What I have observed is that the simultaneous editing of a doc or presentation has helped me in the past to stay focused, visualize the goal that I want to reach better, and also figure out the order of things that must be done, prioritize information and split it in a way that makes sense. Also, sharing ideas has been a major part of the learning process using these tools as well.