About 6 weeks ago, we found out that our big efficacy trial (60 classes of 35 kids spread all over the country) was in trouble. We had the games made for our treatment condition (games that teach fractions), but our plan for getting control games (math games that didn't use fractions) fell apart. So we had 6 weeks to make 2 games from scratch. Since these are going to be control games, we don't actually care if kids learn anything from them. Well, I care, but it's not as critical as it is for the treatment games.
Our first control game is AlgebROCK. It's a puzzle platformer where you're trying to collect musical instruments from evil robots so you can compete in an intergalactic battle of the bands. This game has a pretty hard line separation of game and math. You run around until you get to a control panel or do you need to open. You have to hack it open by solving an algebraic equation. The lack of math-game integration is sort of a downer, but it does let us put the math right in the kids face. We'll see how it performs.
As a side note, we really only managed to get this game turned around in time because Unity made it so easy to layout the levels. Here's a shot of the editor for one of the levels.
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