Decimal Point: Designing and developing an educational game to teach decimals to middle school students

Research shows that U.S. students are falling behind in mathematics. Concurrently, computer and video games transfix students. Unfortunately, little academic content is typically presented in such games. Researchers have seized the opportunity to develop educational games, a promising new area of research exploring learning and motivational benefits. We are designing, developing, and evaluating an educational game that explores how erroneous examples can help middle school students learn decimals. Erroneous examples are an instructional technique for learning mathematics that show step-by-step examples of how to solve problems in which one or more of the steps are incorrect. These types of examples have recently been investigated within educational technology as a means for instructing students on mathematics, with promising learning results. The puzzle-like challenge of erroneous examples – finding and correcting errors – meshes nicely with the concept of game playing. Our game, “Decimal Point, the Fantastically Fabulous World of Fractional Fun,” is based on an amusement park metaphor. Players travel to different areas in the park and play a variety of short web-based computer games to learn about decimals. Players watch different fantasy characters play the games and make common errors in erroneous example mode. The students are prompted to find the errors, and also to self explain and fix them. In direct play mode, a student plays the game him or herself. Prompted self-explanation questions support the student’s conceptual understanding of decimals. This paper presents a detailed view of our game design process, which follows from the nascent literature on developing educational games. Our goal is to present a consolidated view of our process so that we – and others – can leverage and build on it in the future.