Mangahigh Launches First Curriculum-Compliant Online Maths Games For 11-16 Year-Olds

Games and Education Innovators Team Up to Boost Maths Learning

Against a backdrop of UK maths standards falling to an all-time low (UK students now rank only 24th in maths proficiency, according to the PISA international league table), Mangahigh today launches the first curriculum-compliant, games-based learning site focusing on maths for secondary school students. Mangahigh is led by Dr. Marcus du Sautoy (maths professor at the University of Oxford and Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science) and Toby Rowland (co-founder of King.com, one of the world’s largest casual games companies), who have teamed up to improve children’s maths ability.

Mangahigh’s games are designed with maths at their core and feature commercial-quality gameplay, rewarding students with curriculum-compliant achievements that celebrate their progress. Through gameplay, Mangahigh aims to provoke students to explore sophisticated maths concepts and reinforce skills through repetition. The games are supported by Prodigi, the world’s first adaptive maths learning engine for Key Stages 3 and 4.

Mangahigh will launch with five completely original maths games that are free and fun to play and are designed to make maths challenging, yet playable in a gaming context. The games allow students to grasp and practice sophisticated maths concepts in an entertaining way. The launch games are:

1. Save Our Dumb Planet – protect Earth from meteors and other space hazards by using algebra skills to calculate accurate trajectories for a life-saving surface-to-space missile. Players use algebraic substitution, indices, coordinates and graph-plotting to plan their missile flight paths, leading them through linear, quadratic and, eventually, cubic equations.
2. Flower Power – grow and harvest valuable and exotic flowers to make your horticultural fortune. Players practice their knowledge of fractions, decimals and percentages with beautiful results.
3. Pyramid Panic – help a prematurely-entombed mummy escape from a pyramid by solving geometry puzzles to build a path across the burial chamber to the exit. Set in Ancient Egypt, players start with simple puzzles involving areas and lengths of rectangles, triangles and kites, through more complex applications of Pythagoras’ rule, to the ultimate challenge of solving problems involving trigonometry.
4. BIDMAS Blaster – Professor BIDMAS' roborators have run amok and need to be destroyed. In this fast-paced action game, players practice their skills with brackets, indices, division, multiplication, addition and subtraction.
5. Mangahigh’s most powerful game is Prodigi, a maths learning engine that features thousands of maths problems with worked solutions and hints that adapt to each student’s ability and learning speed. Students, teachers and parents can customise Prodigi by skipping items that have already been mastered in the classroom, or focusing on areas that need specific attention. If necessary, students can learn using Prodigi with a minimum of intervention from educators, as it guides the student through the maths curriculum in a logical, pedagogic order.

“Maths is frequently perceived as boring and irrelevant by students. Mangahigh aims to make maths fun and engaging through the use of games and also to spark an interest that reaches beyond the curriculum,” said Dr. Marcus du Sautoy. “Mangahigh will enrich students beyond the nuts and bolts of GSCE; it will give them context and a deeper insight into maths, as well as interesting facts that they can share with their friends.”

“Mangahigh aims to fuse online games and maths. Having observed millions of players hone their game-playing skills at King.com, I realised that, if this same motivation and stimulation could be bought to mathematics education, it could be a game-changer,” added Toby Rowland.

About Mangahigh

Mangahigh is the developer and publisher of the first curriculum-compliant maths games for 11-16 year-old students. Mangahigh is led by an experienced team of mathematicians, educationalists and games designers; key executives include: Toby Rowland, CEO and founder of Mangahigh, formerly the co-CEO and co-founder of King.com, one of the world’s largest casual games companies; and Dr. Marcus du Sautoy, Chairman of Mangahigh’s Board of Advisors, currently Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science.

For more information, visit Mangahigh.

Comments

[Brittany205]

Educational Math games are an excellent way to integrate technology into education. The students are learning how to use the computers while at the same time working on their math skills. In my elementary school, we had special days when we went to the computer lab and played educational games and I remember feeling good about learning to use computers while playing a game. Children now spend more time playing games online then before so giving them fun and educational options to play is very good idea.

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I like this idea a lot because I have always struggled with higher level math. Maybe they should think about creating math games for people who struggle with Trigonometry or Calculus. I think students and teachers would enjoy the fruits of that labor. Especially me... I really don't like math.

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