On my travels in Malaysia, I met with the founders of Zap Zap Math. They showed me their awesome maths games application and we exchanged ideas on learning related gamification.
The application is fully game based and was designed from a maths teacher point of view to help students to learn maths and practise maths concepts in their spare time. Whether it is at home with parents, on their own or as part of teaching homework, children can play fun games and increase their math skills at the same time. For the learning nerdy out there it also follows Blooms taxonomy. If you have no idea what that stands for, just trust me to say that it is good learning design.
The games progress in difficulty, the interface is fun and quality design. Sign-up requires a bit of help from an adult for those children that are not yet fluent in their reading skills. You start by picking an avatar, typically a one-eyed fun looking character and you pick your game name or let the system randomly pick it. Each lesson is structured into a number of mini-games, which teach you different math concepts as you progress. By completing mini-games, you are then invited to upgrade your spaceship. Each set of mini-games correlates with specific math concepts and tests for accuracy and speed in the higher levels.
It is an ideal teaching aid and a way of parents of young math learners to have fun together whilst also improving essential skills. For young children with no reading skills, a parents is necessary to understand play. But as they gain reading skills children could happily play on their own. Schools around the world are using it as a teaching aid. It was set up with both the Asian and US math curriculum in mind up to K-6 (primary school).
The gameplay is fun, the graphics are ideal for the target audience and it increases essential math skills. Here is a short teaser video to give you a sneak peak, but really download it and try it out:
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