Educational Math Game (No Name Yet)

GSOC 2008 IDEA

The educational math game will use a child's love of collecting things to teach them math. The idea is that at the start of a new game the player is given a fish tank and a view of a pond with fish swimming around inside with numbers on their sides. When the student has an empty tank they are allowed to "catch" a set number of fish from the pond to populate their tank.

This is when the actual game starts. Depending on the difficulty settings two or more fish swim to the front of the tank revealing their numbers with various mathematical signs between them(+-/*). The player then chooses("catches") fish trying to solve the math problem. If the correct fish is chosen then it is added to the player's fish tank. If the student incorrectly guesses a certain number of times in a row a help dialog There would be a shop feature which allows players to cash in their fish for tokens of some sort which would then allow them to buy different items to decorate their fish tank like coral, seaweed, shells, and castles.

I plan to be able to use this game to teach basic arithmetic, algebra, and possibly even trigonometry. The teachers of the students playing the game will be able to create and load files containing customized equations and answers for the students to load into the game. The equations would then be what appeared in the fish tank. The teachers creating the files would also be able to set a difficulty level of easy, medium or hard. All of this would be done with a separate "Teacher Only" program that would create the files. If I can figure it out I would also implement a "random" feature that instead of using a file of equations and answers the program would solve the "random" equations that appear in the tank as they appear. The student would be able to choose whether to use the random feature or load a file when playing. I have yet to think of a name for the game because the name is not the most important part of the project at this point in time.

Possible ways of Implementation

• C++ and SDL
• Python and pygame

Additional Information

• I have an idea to make the game customizable so that if a child doesn't like collecting the fish they could collect other things: rocks, hermit crabs, bugs, basically anything you could think of that a child might like to collect. This would probably be done with a plain text file that the user could load into the program.

• Artwork: I have some friends that are willing to do the artwork for the game. Other artists are also welcome to submit their artwork. And as soon as I get the customization working, their own custom themes.