A team of students is putting finishing touches on a fantasy-themed calculus game scheduled for completion in mid-May.
The goal: make calculus more fun and accessible for students at all levels of mastery.
Digital Calculus Coach is funded by the UT System’s Transforming Undergraduate Education grant. Assistant Professor Monica Evans applied for the grant February 2009 and received funding four months later to create the educational, serious game.
The game may show up in UTD math courses, community colleges and high schools to aid learning.
“Most of the money in the grant has gone to hiring students, which is what I think is the point of any grant — to, at the very least, keep our very best students funded,” Evans said.
About 15 students are working on the project — a 10-20 hour per week commitment — with a few more students on the way, Evans said. The students work together to create the 2-D animated game using a combination of computer programs, databases and languages: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Flash, mySQL and PHP.
“I think it’s really exciting to take a different approach to education,” said arts and technology graduate and head programmer William Lemons.
Evans said they chose to create a 2-D game in Flash to maximize the amount of computers capable of running the software. The game will be available online, either browser-based on the UTD Web site or downloadable, Evans said.
The player will use their NetID to sign in, then the game will track user performance.
“The idea is that you will be able to sit down in the GEMS lab for example, or at home, open up the game and play it,” Evans said.
The main character is the captain of an airship, working for Admiral Newton, referring to Isaac Newton, founder of calculus. Newton is racing to find the fundamental theorem of calculus, Evans said.
“It is silly. We are aware of it. We think a silly calculus game is far more fun,” Evans said.
Players will be presented with different type problems dependent on which in-game floating island they choose to visit with their airship. Limit Island, a mining colony, will teach players everything there is to know about limits. Derivaria, a caste system tiered city, teaches players basic derivatives including the sum rule, the power rule and rates of change.
Both islands are populated with characters in need of the player’s help. Using calculus, the player provides assistance and becomes their hero, Lemons said.
The game won’t include every aspect of calculus.
“We’re not intending to teach all of calculus because that’s very, very big, and we want to see if it works first,” Evans said.
The software provides supplemental instruction and is meant to be used as an additional learning tool.
“It’s the thing you should use when it is six in the morning and you have a test the next day and you just can’t remember how to do limits when they have that silly absent value in the middle,” Evans said.
According to Arts & Technology graduate and game artist Bobby Frye, there are parallels between studying calculus and game mechanics.
“One of the biggest advantages of video games is repetition. You play Space Invaders, and it’s doing the same thing over and over again. It reinforces the concepts you learn,” Frye said. “It’s not like you’re just running and jumping on goombas.”
Frye explains that the game does not seek to trick its users into doing math, instead it provides players with incentives and feedback through an innovative reward system. As players complete milestone tasks in the game they will unlock new hats which can be used to customize their character.
“You’d be surprised by how much it changes your character,” Frye said. “And hats are more than just customizing your character—they’re bragging rights.”
Aside from the game’s unique purpose, the game world is distinctive in its own right. Players will find themselves in a whimsical land populated by dragons, floating islands and a giant walking steam kettle. Frye said a lot of effort was put into the look and feel of the game.
“It looks fun, it looks pretty and we’re hoping people will be drawn into the world,” Frye said.
Frye gestured toward dozens of beautifully illustrated concept art pieces scattered across his workspace and tacked on to the walls of the game’s research laboratory.
“My favorite thing about the game is that we have characters that are based off of historical mathematicians—and the history of math is really interesting,” Frye said.
One such character created by Frye is The Witch of Agnesi, based on a mathematical curve by the same name and proposed by historical figure Maria Agnesi. The Witch of Agnesi is a pirate with flowing red hair and a hat in the shape of the curve she studied, Frye said.
Another character is Cotan the Barbarian, referring to the trigonometric function cotangent. Cotan the Barbarian wields a sword in the form of a slide rule and even comes equipped with his own song.
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