I remember back in middle school (5th-6th grades) playing adventures in math for the first time. While the graphics weren’t very good compared to today’s standards, back then they were still pretty good. I was always pretty good at math so I really enjoyed this game because I could always do better than the other people in my classes and that made me feel pretty good.
It also gave me a chance to help other people out with the puzzles and in that way it helped both of the people involved.
It helped my understand the materials better and it also helped out other students by allowing another student to teach the material and relate a little bit more to the thought processes of the other students. The game definitely improved my math skills and also critical thinking skills because of the variety of games involved. It made doing the math fun because you received treasures and rewards for completing the tasks at hand.
One weakness of the game is that it only offered one player mode. Understandably it is an educational game that is meant for either self-development or the realization of what one person needs to study and therefore could be embarrassing to play with others. But the addition of two player
mode would allow other students to go through the game together and have a more vested interest in doing well in the game.
The best part of the game would be the fact that it’s set in a castle, not somewhere where one would normally think of doing math. A classroom setting would be boring and not as adventurous of a game. The fact that the game also required the student to move around about the castle with the arrow pads allowed some control over what was going on and created more of a video game atmosphere than an educational game (which I believe is the most important aspect of educational games, the ability for the student to learn without actually feel like learning).
Another plus that would have been great to add to the game would be a choice of difficulty levels in order to appeal to more advanced users as well as those students who haven’t had the opportunity to go through as much material as others. Time trials of specific material would also have been great in order to sharpen certain skills and also learn completely new material before being exposed to everything in the full game mode.
