The challenge
The Gamified Learning studio explored how games teach: along with content, and also behaviors, habits, identities, and ways of thinking. Drawing from Seymour Papert’s constructionism and his book Mindstorms, we investigated how making, tinkering, and playful systems can transform how students learn.
Math is shaping the systems that govern our world: from AI and elections to opportunity and public policy, yet most adults feel shut out of it. That’s not just an education issue; it’s a civic one.
Z looked into ways to make Math learning more accessible and exciting for younger students.
Research
Z enjoyed learning math in ways that format it somewhat like a game. This is why he absolutely loves his number theory class he was taking, because basically every problem is actually extremely simple when you know what to do, its finding what to do that is hard. When he was in elementary school he played a really fun math game called four fours. In this game, you have only four fours and all operations to make as many numbers as you can. The actual math in this is quite simple, but figuring out what to do is hard. He also did a lot of scratch, which was the first programming language he used.
Iterations
Different games and layouts were attempted which were tested with users to measure engagement, learning and repeatability.
Final Outcome
The project aims to develop a collection of interactive games aimed at kids in elementary school through high school designed to teach graphing and arithmetic by having players do things like constructing functions to match guidelines and generating numbers under constraints.