Curriculum-Focused Online Games for Students with Social Functionality

In the wake of the Obama Administration’s unveiling of its “Educate to Innovate” campaign to revitalize education in the U.S., Mangahigh (www.mangahigh.com) today launches the first curriculum-focused, games-based learning site in the U.S. focusing on math for 11 to 16 year olds. The company also announced new social features, based on casual games models, such as the display of awards, rankings and competition results.

The company, which launched earlier this year in the U.K., is drawing on the recent success of its unique approach to games-based learning by offering it to U.S. students, teachers and parents. Mangahigh was created by a team of games and education innovators, including Dr. Marcus du Sautoy, mathematics professor at the University of Oxford, and Toby Rowland, co-founder of King.com, one of the world’s largest casual games companies. Stemming from their combined expertise, the free games are designed specifically to improve students’ math skills in a more engaging and entertaining format.

“Teachers using Mangahigh games tell us that students more enthusiastically engage with math when it’s at the core of games,” said Rowland, CEO and founder of Mangahigh. “This approach engages students completely and encourages them to repetitively practice mathematical tasks, which is the key to turning gameplay into academic learning.”

This announcement comes against a backdrop of declining math scores in the U.S. American students ranked 35th out of 57 countries – their lowest ranking since 2000, according to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Mangahigh works to retain student interest and spark excitement in learning through games that teach curriculum-focused material while providing real-world applications using math.

“To keep students interested in mathematics, an effective teacher must have a lot of tools in their toolbox,” commented Sandi Osterwise, math teacher at Johanna Perrin Middle School in Fairport, NY. “I look forward to adding Mangahigh to mine. The practice Mangahigh provides will help my students improve their skills and their attitude towards mathematics.”

Mangahigh launches with seven completely original math games that are free, fun and designed to make math challenging and playable. The games enable students to grasp and practice sophisticated mathematics concepts and are supported by Prodigi, the world’s first adaptive mathematics learning engine for grades 5 through 10. The launch games are:

1. TranStar - guide TranStar through outer space in search of a new home with the help of a StarGate. Players hone their geometry skills though the exotic space transformation phenomena as they reflect, rotate, translate and enlarge TranStar out of danger.
2. Ice Ice Maybe - help penguins migrate across an ocean patrolled by hungry killer whales. To assist in this perilous journey, estimation and approximation skills are used to position floating icebergs that help penguins bounce to safety.
3. Save Our Dumb Planet – protect Earth from meteors and other space hazards by using algebra skills to calculate accurate trajectories for a planet-saving surface-to-space missile. Players use algebraic substitution, indices, coordinates and graph-plotting to plan their missile flight paths, leading them through linear, quadratic and, eventually, cubic equations.
4. Flower Power - grow and harvest valuable and exotic flowers to build your own horticultural fortune. Players develop their knowledge of fractions, decimals and percentages, with beautiful results.
5. Pyramid Panic – help a prematurely entombed mummy escape from a pyramid in ancient Egypt by solving geometry puzzles to exit a burial chamber. Players work with simple puzzles involving areas and lengths of rectangles, triangles and kites before moving onto more complex applications of the Pythagorean Theorem, to the ultimate challenge of solving problems involving trigonometry.
6. BIDMAS Blaster – Professor BIDMAS’ roborators have run amok and need to be destroyed. In this fast-paced action game, players practice their skills with brackets, indices, division, multiplication, addition and subtraction.
7. Mangahigh’s most powerful game is Prodigi, a mathematics learning engine that features thousands of math problems with solutions and hints that adapt to each student’s ability and learning speed. Students, teachers and parents can customize Prodigi by skipping items that have already been mastered in the classroom, or focus on areas that need specific attention. If necessary, students can learn using Prodigi independently away from school, as it guides the student through the math curriculum in a logical, teacher-friendly order.

Tags: Earth, Education, Education in the United States, Math, Oxford University, Programme for International Student Assessment, Pythagorean Theorem, United States