Behind the Scenes and Thoughts on Game Play for Kids Pattern Recognition
Kids Pattern Recognition is a math game for kids where the objective is to find the missing element in a pattern. There are 120 ABAB and ABCABC patterns. The difficulty level is about right for most four and five year old children.
I decided on doing a pattern app because I believe that strong math skills later in life come from a really good foundation of practical number sense and logic. Recognizing, identifying and creating patterns are the basis
of practically all learning, not just math. Human brains are always categorizing, and
looking for similarities and differences in all we see and do. Recognizing patterns in unusual places is a
large part of what drives innovation and creativity.
A book I read called The Talent Code, talks about how
deliberate practice strengthens the connections in the brain. Mastery of a skill is developed by doing
something over and over and over. In doing
so your body creates a substance called myelin that line the pathways for the
skill in your brain and makes the skill easier, faster, and remembered.
Drilling is a common teaching technique to obtain mastery, yet
two aspects of repetitive practice are hard to overcome.
The first being attention span, the second being efficiency. While drilling
might be the best way to develop a skill it can become boring. It is easier to spend a little bit of time to
get good enough, then a lot of time to master a skill. A
computer game is ideal for drilling because you can provide the psychological challenge
and reward system of a game to avoid boredom, along with a lot of problems in a
short amount of time.
Every good game has a narrative. The story for Kids
Pattern Recognition is that three bad aliens, a leader and two minions, kidnap a
bunch of cute alien monsters. The hero
takes his rocket ship into space to rescue the cute aliens and lock up the bad
aliens. He travels to three galaxies
that have approximately thirteen planets each.
There are only kidnapped aliens on a few of the planets. Many educational games use an excessive amount
of praise for rewards (ie “good job”, “you are smart”, etc). While it seems innocuous, many psychologists and educational experts say
excessive praise can back fire and make the child feel less interested and less accomplished. In Kids Pattern
Recognition the reward is moving to the next planet and getting closer to
rescuing a cute alien. The kidnapped
aliens are placed intermittently to avoid diluting the accomplishment of a rescue. At the end of each galaxy is
where a bad guy is confronted. First you have to capture the minions, and in the final galaxy you get the leader. The game play changes slightly in these levels to add a twist to the challenge.
In the regular levels you must solve three patterns without
making more than four mistakes. In the
final level of each galaxy you have to solve an unknown number of patterns
before the time runs out. By imposing
limits in the game play, the child has to focus on the patterns and not just
touch the screen randomly to get the correct answer.
I am new at game making, and was unsure if the techniques I
was using were executed well enough. My
daughter loved the game, but it was hard to tell if she liked it because I made it, or because she is just enthusiastic about everything. Beta testing also seemed favorable and now that the app is live feedback has been really positive.
Kids in the target age group are engaged in the game and enjoy playing it
repeatedly. Hopefully they are gaining good foundational experience in
comparing, contrasting, and observing, as well.
What's Next:
There will be two or three more games of increasing difficulty added to this story line.
Purchase Kids Pattern Recognition from the following app markets:
Browsing the web one day, I discovered that one of my favorite children's book authors,
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