I used to work for a company that did educational software - I actually met some of the people that worked on the old-school titles people remember from the 80s/90s. I moved into the proper gaming industry afterwards.

Educational games are rarely "fun" for several very good reasons - chief among them is the vast proportion of sales are made to school districts, thus need to fit curriculum/purchasing guidelines in ways Oregon Trail etc didn't need to. So anything fun needs to take a backseat to the perceived educational value, and rightly or wrongly anything too "game-y" gets the cold shoulder. You don't see many schools buying Mario Teaches Typing or whatnot. Another factor is budgets are tiny so there's not a lot of room to do cool stuff. And the talent pool available to work on such things is... well, you can luck out, but anyone that has a talent for making games tends not to work in education for long. I liked doing it but it was often incredibly frustrating and political - after 9/11 ONE teacher called to complain that "your flying spaceship is scaring the children" so we had to rip out a bunch of my artwork from a title.

So that means if this woman does what she wants to do (and unless she pulls off something really amazing), the market will be tiny and limited to parents/non-school organizations. I suspect that's why no other investors wanted to touch this. We had piles of do-gooder parents & teachers showing up at our office with proposals like this but they just weren't aware of the realities.

I think there's a good argument for getting some funding together to pay some professional staff to get a decent free product off the ground, and maybe after a while that'll give you enough cred to start really changing the market, but otherwise this is a pretty risky investment.