SERIOUS MATHEMATICS GAME DESIGN TO ENGAGE LEARNERS

Advances in serious games have influenced education, and transformed the teaching-learning processes, among others aspects. There have been educational games that improve particular math skills but lack in the educational paradigms goals or the engaging elements. Our work follows the pedagogical Approach methodology and our final goal is to improve the math competences: 55 % Mexican students have not the skills in mathematic to compete in the working world according to the PISA exam.
The main learning paradigm that has our serious game prototype is constructivism, and more specific, the Common Pedagogical Approach (CPA) built upon Jerome Brunner’s Theory of Representation.

Enactive -> Iconic -> Symbolic
Representation Representation Representation

Our purpose for each mini-game is that the kid will need to be moved from the concrete representation (understand the problem) then to the pictorial representation (play the game without any formal math language), and finally, the abstract representation with abstract language like numbers and symbols.

For example, in the mini-game “which one is greater ” there are three interfaces where each one represents each stage of the CPA: first, enactive representation, when the child reads the instructions and knows that has to slide the finger to the item that weights more in one the weighting scale; secondly, the iconic representation, where there are several weights scales with items and the child has decide which one weights more; and finally, the symbolic representation, which does not have weights scale, it has several items in different scales like: kilograms, grams, milligrams. The game will increase in difficult by having different items.