MathBRIX
MathBRIX is an educational game app that received funding from Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) in January 2016. We wanted to create an app to develop children's math skills at a young age that was fun and engaging, adaptive so the game is always at their level, has an easy-to-use teacher/parent managing system, and is Common Core aligned. I did the design and front-end development on the teacher portion and the design of the four games on the student portion.
MathBRIX follows a spiral approach where concepts
are presented in small bites and revisited over and
over again, gaining in complexity each time. With this approach, intuitive leaps play as big a role as the
acquisition of small, successive pieces of information.
If desired, questions answered correctly and scores are sent to the optional teacher portion of the app. Here their overall progress and patterns are tracked and easily viewed. All the teacher/parent needs to do is create the class(es) or individual children accounts.
In no time and a few games, they can view the patterns and habits of students by class, grade level, or standards.
They can also view the habits and patterns of an individual student.
The lessons in MathBRIX are Common Core aligned, however, MathBRIX contains a database of the math standards for each grade level to view at any time.
MathBRIX actively involves kids in the world of math with its emphasis on thinking and problem solving.
With mandated state-wide testing, many elementary school programs put the focus on mastery of
computation. Learning how to think mathematically
is essential not only for success in high school courses but many other areas of life. As children proceed through the sequences, they solidify hard-to-teach concepts and learn techniques to apply them.
MathBRIX consists of four different games:
Brix Master
Mini Computer
Magic Squares
Venn Diagram
I created these friendly monsters with interchanging eyes, antennae, bodies and color. They will replace the colored lego blocks in more difficult levels of Venn Diagram.
Lastly for the game portion of the app, I created 16 different student avatars if the teacher opts not to upload pictures.
Throughout the process, the questions we continually asked ourselves were how can we do what other educational math game apps do only do it better? How can we give teachers and parents a product that will keep their students/child(ren) engaged but still develop math skills? How can we comply with Common Core standards to do this? How can we make this product as light and simple to use as possible?