Inspiration
One of Alex’s twelve-year-old nephews has been struggling with math in school. After research, Alex discovered COVID-19 resulted in learning loss, particularly in elementary school. Alex’s nephew struggled to find effective study strategies for math that kept his engagement. Alex brought up the idea of a gamified math program to help students like his nephew who might also be struggling with motivation and proficiency in mathematics.
What it does
The application gamifies math in the form of racing monsters, pitting players against bots in a race to solve math equations to the end of the line/their cave. The intention of this game is to incentivize the younger generation to learn about math with a fun and personalized game.
How we built it
We had three phases when building our product they include:
Ideation: We all had thought of ideas trying to see which one we liked the most and that we could implement the best. We were inspired by other online learning websites for classrooms like Kahoot, Quizlet, Gimkit, Booklet, TypeRacer, and Monsters University. However, it came to our attention that none of them specialized in math. Our ideation ultimately resulted in our current product, Math Monsters. A math learning website designed for children to learn simple mathematics like addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication.
Designing: We had one student work as a website layout designer who was in charge of building the layout of the website and creating visuals that would become the basis of our background. We had two students work as the GFX artists for all of our monsters and their customizations Thinking of our younger audience, we had to think about what would entertain them in learning one of the hardest subjects, math. We decided to create cartoon characters and introduce special customization for children to personify their monsters. Having that close relation with their monsters would definitely inspire them to continue their math learning.
Coding: Once the ideation and designing of all the components for the website was done we converged our efforts over to coding. We had one student spearhead the coding using the languages; HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Implementing these languages, our product was able to run on a local html website where it was brought to life.
Challenges we ran into
Conditional image rendering - the customize monster screen requires displaying 3 variations of a monster based upon a base monster model. This means that these images must be generated "on-the-fly"
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of our final product, Math Monsters. Our idea came into fruition and we believe that it has the ability to change the math scene in the younger generations and hopefully expand in the future. To make the project a little more personalized, we designed monsters for each of the group members. Seeing ourselves on our product brings great pride.
What we learned
While producing this product, we were introduced to game design and targeting our product to our intended audience. Since this game is made for the younger generation, we had to make our product attention grabbing and fun for the kids to be more incentivized to learn about math. Creating cute and customizable monsters was one of the objectives of keeping their attention and fueling their desire to learn math. Implementing the skills learned in various coding languages to create one single product is another skill that was learned.
What's next for Math Monsters
In the future, we plan to use AI to access a player’s performance and pinpoint their mathematical weaknesses. Then, we will focus on strengthening that aspect for players to make them proficient in math.
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