Number Chase

Software	Any language with good GUI facilities, or smartphone technology stack, possibly speech recognition software
Covers	Programming, game design, interface development
Skills Required	Programming, interaction design, possibly mobile app development
Challenge	Conceptual ?? Technical ?? Programming ???

Brief Description

"You've got to learn your tables!" Understanding how to do arithmetic isn't enough. You need to learn to be fluent at it. An important part of this is learning a lot of simple number facts so you can recall them instantly without thinking about them, so you can use them in more complicated problems. 7 times 9 is immediately 63. So primary schools try to drill children in number facts, for instance by getting them to recite times tables.

The aim of this project is to gamify learning number facts and doing simple mental arithmetic, so that the repetitive drill that people need to put in to get the number facts to stick and make mental arithmetic easier and faster stops being a chore.

The basic idea of the game is that on each level, the player needs to run along a path or through a maze, being pursued by a monster, to reach safety. The path has a number of gates or secret doors where the player needs to input a secret code or answer a riddle. The questions are simple number fact questions that can answered by typing two or three digits. While the player is answering the question at the gate the monster is catching up. If the player is too slow answering, the monster will pounce. At more advanced levels, the monster might move faster, or the player has less of a head start, or the questions are harder. The simplest version of the game could do the player movement itself, leaving the player to solve the riddles; or the player could control movement as well as the question answering.

Variants

The game might be made more elaborate by having different types of paving that different effects on the speed of the player or the monster, or by having more complicated maps where the player gets a choice of which way to go, with one way offering relatively easy questions with the monster in hot pursuit, and another way offering a gate with a harder question and the opportunity to get a decent lead.

More elaborate paths or mazes might be produced by a maze generation algorithm. See Maze Wars.

An alternative to making the player type the answer would be to accept voice input, using a speech recognition system, with or without spoken instructions.

The game could run on a smartphone rather than a desktop or laptop. This might work well for a game with voice inputs.

The game mechanism might also work for other kinds of recognition learning where the user needs to learn to answer particular types of questions or put names to things by repetitive practice. But inputting the answers needs to be very quick. It might work for multiple choice questions, but the alternatives would need to be quick to read. It might work better if the inputs are spoken and recognised by the system. What possibilities can you think of? Can you design the system so that it can be adapted to different kinds of learning by plugging in another content module?

How else could a game put a player under tight time pressure to answer questions, to provide an exciting/frightening environment to practise mental arithmetic?

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