A change in the winds

After seeing the third or fourth math game we made come back from a study that showed no significant learning for the kids, I had a revelation.

If you want to make a game that teaches kids, you have to make sure that the content in the game can teach kids without the game.

It might seem sort of obvious, but that was never really a part of how we were making games. We all assumed that because our math experts were experts (they are actually quite good at teaching math), they would be able to work with the game designers to make good math games. What actually happens is that the math teachers and the game designers both constantly compromise to try and meet the other groups goals. For our next game, I asked for a little change in direction.

Our math experts would come up with a topic they wanted to teach. They'd go out and make a worksheet that teaches that topic. Kids would do the worksheet, and we'd see what they learned. It actually took 4 revisions of the worksheet before we saw reasonable learning. Then I got our game folks together and we made a game out of it.

Thus was born Rosie's Rates. It's not a great game (it's very pedantic) and kind of boring, but it TEACHES KIDS! They're actually less critical of it than I am (I hear it's more fun than their textbooks). This is the game that proved we now know how to make teaching games. Pretty heady stuff.