Boom Boom Pirates!

Objective

To design an effective and engaging geometry game for 6th graders.

What is this game?

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This is a two-player basic geometry game, designed to provide an effective and engaging learning experience for 6th graders. It involves two players who see each other as the evil pirate who is trying to kill them! Players compete to enter the correct angle to rotate and fire the canon in the shortest time, before the opponent fires his.

Boom Boom Pirates! promotes Flexibly Adaptive Instructional Design (Schwartz, Lin, Brophy & Bransford, 1999) in two ways. Firstly, learning activities can be tailored to the situated conditions while maintaining a focus on core disciplinary knowledge. Secondly, it supports flexibility by allowing teachers to modify game questions easily.

In order to overcome the "inert knowledge" problem, sufficient practice is given to players to experience a variety of problems  and hence transfer their knowledge in novel situations. These questions are adaptive to cater to both the stronger and weaker players. On one hand, stronger players need to be constantly challenged and seem to thrive on it. However, questions also need to cater to the weaker students so that they feel that they are still in the game.It was emphasized in Sedighian (1996) that students need to be succeed in mathematics to want to learn more mathematics. In Gee (2006), it was argued that good video games lower the consequence of failure. Players are encouraged to take risks, explore and try new things.

Hence in this game, to encourage a sense of achievement among lower achievers in mathematics, players are given meaningful hints for incorrect answers instead of "Incorrect, please try again!". Scores are given sparingly, even after players answered correctly only after three tries! A study by Sedighian (1996) reveals that some slow-paced students became very excited upon reaching a score of 1000. Their excitement was not because their score was necessarily high compared to their peers but simply because 1000 was a large enough number to them and therefore signalized success.

As the game progresses, players get the dress up their avatar from a novice sailor to the "Regal Captain with the Golden Sword". This game layer provides a visual reward, in addition to scores, to the players. This might be a attraction for 6th graders who do not want to remain novice sailors cladded in shorts when their peers are Captains with boots and mighty hats!

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References
1. Schwartz, D., Brophy, S., Lin, X., & Bransford, J. (1999). Software for Managing Complex Learning: Examples from an Educational Psychology Course. Educational Technology Research and Development, 47, 39-60.
2. Sedighian, K., & Sedighian, A. S. (1996). Can Educational computer games help educators learn about the psychology of learning mathematics in children? Paper presented at 18th Annual Meeting of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, the North American Chapter, Florida, USA.
3. Gee, J.P. (2005). Learning by design: Good video games as learning machines. E-learning and digital media, 2(2).