Mobile Math

Mathematics boring? Not anymore!

MobileMath uses mobile gaming for maths education in secondary education, developed by the Freudenthal Institute and Creative Learning Lab.

Educationists are seeking for new educational formats to match the 'digital life style' of students, particularly in settings that are based on competence-based education. Gaming is a way of making students discover new insights within a rich context. Explorative city-games are such a new, stimulating educational format. Students play an active role when playing the games, and they use the communicative and creative potential of mobile technology and the Internet. MobileMath will deliver insights into how such a modern, mobile and social game can contribute to the learning process, to intrinsic motivation and to an positive attitude towards learning.

The playing field of MobileMath is an empty area, disjoint from the elements of the physical surroundings. Hence it is location-independent and can be put out anywhere. MobileMath is a team game; a team consists of two players who use one mobile phone. On its screen they see a street map of the playing field, their team and the other teams represented as moving dots as they move through the area. The geometrical figures are shown in the colours of the corresponding team. As the playing field fills up with these figures the possibility to score decreases; the teams claim the playing field as in the board game Risk. Players use mobile phones with GPS receivers to upload the corners of the geometrical figures to the game server. Different types of figures carry different weight, the more difficult they are to make the higher they score. Players need to develop a good understanding of quadrangles. Further a good analysis of the map and the surroundings is useful: what is the area, where can we get to easily and where not, and how long will it take to finish a figure?Players can cross the plans of other teams by blocking the figures before the others manage to finish them. This is done by placing another figure within the perimeter of the others'; it is not sufficient to place only one corner point. Players face the dilemma between taking the time for a large of complicated figure and the risk that another team crosses their plans by guessing the aim from the points already set and quickly placing a smaller figure that would block completion. Inversely it is easier to quickly complete a number of small figures; however they have to be fairly complicated to yield a high score.The opposite of the base game play, the construction of figures, is their destruction. Destroying figures releases space in the playing field. Moreover, like blocking other teams, it is fun to destroy the figures of others. To delete an enemy figure, a team has to find the center points of imagined copies of the original figure adjacent to any of the edges of the original figure. By visiting these center points physically and sending the location to the server a team can delete the original figure.MobileMath is an extension to the Dutch EduGIS portal and is partly funded by the innovation programme Ruimte voor Geo-Informatie (RGI).