Mineral Math

A math game created in partnership with Stone-Robinson Elementary

Mineral Math was a passion project created throughout my senior year of high school from 2022-2023 outside of classwork. I worked with teachers, administrators, and students to try to create a game to help young students struggling to learn fractions. 

My Role and What I Learned

I was the sole developer on this project doing all of the programming and design. Some assets were taken from the Unity Asset Store to help my development. Throughout development, I met with some of the kids at Stone-Robinson Elementary to test the game and give their feedback and ideas for it. Since these kids were very young a lot of the commentary about my game was what you might expect. A big thing I learned was that even by paying attention to the seemingly unrelated things they would tell me, I could still learn a lot about what they wanted to see in games. 

One of the comments I remember vividly was a group of students passionately telling me to include Starbucks in my game. I of course wanted to avoid any copyright and could not include this in my game but from this and other comments about wanting to see Spider-Man in the game, I learned how customization was a huge thing kids want to see in games. This reminded me of a math game I loved in elementary school that helped me to learn fractions and multiplication, Reflex Math. The gimmick of this game was that by playing the fun math games you earned a currency you could use to customize your tree house. I remember playing this game even when it wasn't assigned because it was genuine fun and I wanted to have a cool tree house with the space decorations. Customization can be a huge motivator for children to play games and want to play more even when the core subject is something they may usually avoid.

I also talked to the ACPS School Board at one point. In high school, I spent half my time at my base school and half my time at Center 1, an optional campus available to all ACPS students where you took your History and English credits and got to pick Game Design, Music Production, or Cybersecurity as your third extracurricular class. I took Game Design and was speaking to the Board to help them realize the value of Center 1 and the opportunities it provided to students. Talking in front of a large board like this and in front of a crowd of people helped me to gain more confidence in my public speaking abilities.