An Educational Game about Math and Magic

• Autor(a) principal: Lemos, Tiago Luís Fernandes
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/66166
• topic: Mobile game; Educational game; Multiple-choice questions; Inter-action Mechanisms; Shape Recognition; Accelerometer; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Eletrotécnica, Eletrónica e Informática

Every year, technology keeps expanding and progressing, which leads to new ideas and new uses of technology in all kinds of areas, and education is no exception. The concept of using games as a mean of education is old, however, due to the recent advances of technology and the creation of videogames, the concept became more popular. With benefits ranging from a deeper understand-ing of the subject taught in the game, to various other skills obtained passively from playing games, educational games are an idea that should be focused on and developed further. Students spend a very big portion of their free time interacting with their phones. Mobile games are a great way to pass the time with little effort and are enjoyable for being simple and fun. However, most of the mobile games have no real educational purpose. Meanwhile, most students struggle with some school subjects and end up losing the motivation to study, which leads to them failing classes or losing important knowledge. Therefore, we decided to create a game that would appeal to them, while also helping them obtain or solidify their math knowledge. We created the game in a way that takes the focus from the educational as-pects, using a unique story, characters and challenges that keep the player enter-tained. With math questions being answered in different ways like leaning the phone one way or another to make the character reach the right answer, drawing the answer to a question on the screen with a finger like a magic spell, or even having a math duel with an evil wizard, the player can have fun while answering them. To help the player learn from their mistakes the game also offers, after they answer a question, a small explanation of what the right answer was and why. The game was found to have a positive effect on the students, creating inter-est and improving their knowledge, and we were able to create a few guidelines to help increase the success of future educational games.