Serious Game Classification

Our goal is to build Finnish elementary/primary school mathematics into a six years (K-6) game. First grade has already been launched and the complete school will be ready during fall 2012.

The story, “In near future mice can get cheese only by getting through mathematics labyrinths faster than cats can. Your task is to teach necessary skills for your mouse”, gives a kid a reason to play. When pets do have enough skills player can send it to labyrinth to survive on it’s own. To give pupils a feeling that characters are their pets, there are numerous mouses and cats to choose. If player chooses a mouse, it is expected that it is taught correctly. In case player wants to help mice, he/she can start teaching cats wrongly. Eventually, before you can teach wrongly, you have to know correct answers, and so the process is same as when teaching correctly. The game characters can compete with or against any other taught character any time, no matter if the human player is online, because all the taught behavior and skills are always online.

Eedu elements connects learner into things they can experience on daily basis when teaching skills into their game characters. The game characters learn like humans do: inductively case-by-case by building relations between new and existing concepts. The approach is learner centric: the game introduces mathematics in a way that learner can build his/her mental conceptual structures by adding new concepts into known ones. In fact kids are ready make greater effort to learn for their toys or game characters than they would be ready do for themselves.

When the player is responsible for character’s mental development, he/she records also his/her mental conceptual structure during the gameplay, which enables very detailed learning analytics. According to our studies, we can show its educational outcome correlates with classroom outcomes measured with standardized tests. So, eedu elements can give teacher various real time opportunities to support and coach the pupils by applying information visualized about the gameplay.

The game is designed to cover Finnish 1st grade mathematics curriculum: 1) understanding numbers as symbols, as counts and as numbering lines. 2) adding and subtracting numbers 0-20. 3) comparing numbers. 4) solving mathematical problems. 5) understanding clock and time. 6) recognizing basic shapes.

The player shows adequate skills in one theme when completing one level. When the palayer has completed all 45 levels of the game, he/she would also complete Finnish 1st grade mathematics. According our studies, the performance in game correlates with performance measured with paper tests. We can not be sure if three-stars-player would receive number A/5 or C/3 and one-star-palyer C/3 or E/1, but we can be very sure that such players would have completed the Finnish first grade.

Distribution : Internet - Free
Platform(s) : Browser (HTML5)

Links

• Play it Now !
• http://www.eedu.fi/