Myself and a couple of classmates just finished up building a board game called “HyperSpace Explorers” that helps grade 1 students practice addition and subtraction. It’s a space themed game in which players travel around the board collecting pieces to complete their space ships. The full game board can be viewed here.
The problem
We set out to make a game in which every turn involved performing a small math operation. In a typical game with 2 dice, you do have to add the two numbers together to determine your move. This is only barely helpful for learning math though. Obviously, most die only go up to 6. But, the bigger problem is that you don’t actually have to do any addition at all. If you roll a 3 and a 4, you can finish your turn by just counting “1 2 3”, “1 2 3 4”. You never actually count to seven. We suspected that young kids might do this a lot.
The Solution
The board has a 1-20 mode when flipped over.
We found a way around this problem. When a 7 rolled, instead of moving forward 7 spaces, having players jump to the next 7 on the board. This means, you have to finish the math in your head before you can move your piece. This is a subtle change that has a big impact on what’s going on inside players’ heads.
Making a Game to Fit the Curriculum
By the end of grade 1, students are expected to learn addition and subtraction up to 20. But, most dice have only six sides, and they can’t be used for subtraction withou adding complicated rules. Instead, we decided to use a “digital die” that we called the “hyperjump controller”. The device actually ended up solving a lot of interesting problems, and made the game much more useful for grade 1 teachers.
Advantages of digital die
- scalable number range, for either 1-10, or 1-20
- can display either addition or subtraction
- game settings can adjust to player ability level
- pre-recorded voice helps kids learn the rules
- correct/incorrect responses can be saved and viewed by the teacher
Special thanks to Anton Kassimov and Juan Garcia for codesigning (and to Juan for producing the art in the post.) Anton writes about games and music at SensesRefined.com, and Juan tweets on software development and education at @homemadecode.
eLearning Pilgrim 