Teaching Foundational Math through a Gaming Experience
Company: Zearn.org
Role: Lead Product Designer
Zearn.org is an educational technology startup building a comprehensive Math curriculum for grades K-5. Snow More, Snow Less is one of 12 games that teach foundational math skills, in a personalized and adaptive learning experience.
Challenges
Existing classroom models rely on memorization and shortcuts, activity will need to teach comprehensive understanding of place value units
Provide enough of a challenge for advanced students with sufficient scaffolding for struggling students
Opportunities
A small but collaborative team allowed us to push the boundaries of what we could do with our concepts and animation that stood out from previous products delivered
Pre-established relationships with public schools in the area allowed us to perform user testing often
Existing Classroom Models
Classroom models and competitive researched showed that students learn to use quick tricks and memorization tactics to look for the “larger” or “smaller” digits when comparing numbers.
Our main goal was to create an experience that taught students concrete understanding of numbers using place value models.
Gamification of Foundational Math Skills
Designed an activity with levels that students can progress and regress to depending on performance.
Product Goal
Immersive Environments
Custom illustrations were crucial in achieving a distinct narrative and aesthetic. We invested time in developing the environment from scratch, as oppose to using stock illustrations.
Creating joyful moments when students are wrong
Leveraged the environment of the game to provide joyful learning moments for students that were struggling.
This was a crucial moment to encourages students to learn from mistakes versus creating anxiety around math.
Delightful Progress Bar Through Custom Animation
Takeaways and Learnings
Early involvement of every team member kept everyone in line with project scope and priorities, which kept us within our timeline of 4 months to develop and launch.
Metrics
Since launching this game, 987,132 students have successfully completed an activity with at least 70% of their answers correct.