Project Title: MathPad

Brief Description: The best part of the day for many young students is recess – a time when they can be active, play and make noise. The worst part may be math class. Unlike recess, gym class, and music class, math class doesn’t really allow for student interaction. The MathPad aims to change that by allowing students to listen to music, move around, and dance while learning math.

Target Audience(s): Our target audience would be students who are learning place value breakdowns, yet would still enjoy the idea of using a dance pad to learn. Namely, we would target early to mid elementary school age students.

These students would need to have access to a dance pad and their own computer. Additionally, we can expand the target audience to lower ages and higher ages by varying difficulty and music speed, as well as varying the topic (such as adding spelling).

Client or Collaborator: Seeing as our project would be used for educational purposes, there are many possibilities for who we may choose to work with in the future. Our clients in the future may include public and private elementary schools, tutoring centers, and even parents who may wish to purchase the device for their children.

Potential partners that could help us in further developing this product would include game developers such as Ubisoft Learnington, which helped develop games like Guitar Hero, which combines the use of music with interactive games.

Similar/competitive products in genre: The “Kumon” system is a product which attempts to fulfill the niche of learning quick math. In Kumon, students sit down, and perform math in a timed environment. This can become stressful, and the sitting down disengages kinesthetic learners. Our project would take the concept of timed learning and push it one step further by making it rhythmic. Sitting down to perform math problems cannot be compared to the excitement felt by hitting a note in Guitar Hero.

Another, more directly competing product would be something like the video game “Big Brain Academy”. Big Brain Academy is excellent for learning through pointing and clicking, but it fails to fully incorporate all the movement a kinesthetic learner might need to become engaged.

Full Description: Our product is to combine two activities that are on radically different ends of the enjoyment spectrum – one involves mental development that is often taught in a very structured manner while the other involves a more unstructured approach that involves physical activity and music. Our reasoning for combining these two ideas is to try and help young children in elementary schools who struggle with developing their math skills. In a traditional educational environment, these children may not have alternative means that are tailored towards their strengths. MathPad attempts to solve this problem by offering a more interactive learning experience.

The way our product works is the user, presumably an adult or teacher, would load the program on a computer and plug the dance-pad into the computer. There would then be a menu on screen that would allow the adult to start the game, and the player, probably a young student, would then stand in the middle of the dance-pad. As the game starts, an addition problem or just a number would appear on the screen. The top three spots on the dance pad would correspond, from left to right, to 100, 10, and 1. The player would then have to stomp on each spot however many number of times in order to create the answer or the number on the screen. For example, if the number was 349, the player would stomp on the 100 spot three times, the 10 spot four times, and the 1 spot nine times. After a set amount of time, the game would end and the child would be given a score based on how many questions he or she answered correctly. The higher the score, the better the Hedgehog Harry mascot will sleep, allowing the player to have some sort of objective in completing the game. The top 10 scores would be saved locally to each computer so that students would hopefully be compelled to improve for competitive purposes or personal pride.

The product would be marketed mainly towards schools and learning centers by showing them an in-person demonstration of how to product works or a short presentation on how it works. MathPad would be sold as a standalone product that does not require a subscription. We would also support the product mainly through the use of an email where users can send their concerns or questions so that they can receive a response back from or team.

Special Requirements: Dance Pad

Bibliography: https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/YL1awWIMJtgpOaH5ooJiPOOv82UPSl6lhttps://www.kumon.com/