I practically grew up on edutainment when I was ~4-8 years old. My first computer games were Math Blaster, Gizmos&Gadgets, Treasure Mountain, Oregon Trail, Number Munchers, Outnumbered!, and Operation Neptune.
And even beyond the Super Solvers series, there were dozens of others like these, from the game I used to learn to type, to Carmen Sandiego. And beyond the outright edutainment games, most of the rest of my childhood was spent playing Simcity 2000, Age of Empires, and other similar games of the era. I even learned to "use the Internet" by playing Yahooligans' Cybersurfari. (Holy crap, does anyone remember THAT?! Practically lost to history at this point!)
I strongly suspect a good portion of my "intelligence" was actually acquired by exercising my brain in these ways when I very young, rather than due to school or genetics.
I also suspect that there's a whole generation of kids -- born around the same time during the heyday of edutainment (~1988-92) -- who had a similar experience.
I think that Civilization is a large part of the reason I'm a scientist today.
What's the winning strategy in Civilization? Science! As much of it as you can! Everything else in society exists only in order to create the resources which scientists consume (or to defend your borders to enable your scientists to work unmolested by Aztecs and Zulus). Yep, everyone else in society is doing a thankless, pointless job, quickly forgotten as soon as they die, but the contributions of scientists live on forever, slowly advancing society down the tech tree. Is there any better feeling than making a new discovery? Hells no! Each discovery lets you make new and better stuff, as well as putting you forever closer and closer to blasting off to Alpha Centauri. Cities and fields and wonders of the world can burn and almost inevitably do, but nothing can ever take away your scientific knowledge.
Suffice it to say that too much Civilization in my formative years may have crystallized these sorts of values in my impressionable mind. I still see the world as divided into "scientists" and "support staff".
Most of the video games my wife and I played during late childhood stretched and exercised our brains, despite not being classified as "edutainment".
Games like Descent led to extremely developed spatial reasoning skills. Games like Nethack led to a level of meticulousness and a never-give-up, use-every-trick-in-the-book mentality. Games like Starcraft helped develop a sense of complex system dynamics. I was consistently observing the environment, solving puzzles, making tradeoffs and efficiency decisions (do I skip this area? Is it worth crossing that lava to get that powerup?), learning diligence and persistence, and doing controlled experiments to teach me about the games.
I also played a fair number of "edutainment" titles, including one my dad coded himself in the early 1980s, and many of those on your list. They were quite good and certainly helped me exercise my brain, but not to the degree that games like Descent, Starcraft, and Nethack did.
And even beyond the Super Solvers series, there were dozens of others like these, from the game I used to learn to type, to Carmen Sandiego. And beyond the outright edutainment games, most of the rest of my childhood was spent playing Simcity 2000, Age of Empires, and other similar games of the era. I even learned to "use the Internet" by playing Yahooligans' Cybersurfari. (Holy crap, does anyone remember THAT?! Practically lost to history at this point!)
I strongly suspect a good portion of my "intelligence" was actually acquired by exercising my brain in these ways when I very young, rather than due to school or genetics.
I also suspect that there's a whole generation of kids -- born around the same time during the heyday of edutainment (~1988-92) -- who had a similar experience.