If there’s one thing the makers of a the new iPhone app Motion Math hate, it’s the phrase “making learning fun.”
“We think learning already is fun,” said developer Jacob Klein. “When people say ‘make learning fun,’ they imply that learning is this dreadful process that needs sugar put on top of it.”
Nevertheless, the 99-cent app, which involves the phone’s motion sensors and a game of bouncing fractions, is about fun, and about learning. The game is based on Mr. Klein’s work with fellow developer Gabriel Adauto at the Stanford University School of Education. The pair studied something called embodied cognition, which they describe in their notes on the app as “research suggesting that connecting one’s body to abstract concepts can deepen understanding.”
Mr. Klein said they chose to make a game about fractions because it’s a subject that is particularly tough for elementary-school students, and kids do better with fractions if they can develop a visceral understanding of them — something that sounds perfectly attuned to their “embodied cognition” theory.
The app took nine months to make — mainly because of testing and research to make the design as intuitive as possible and to get it to fit with the educational principles the developers were following. “We called it the birthing,” Mr. Adauto said of the length of the development process.
But Motion Math’s co-founders aim to continue making apps. The long-term goal, they said, is to develop an infrastructure that includes data on how people play the game. The data would not be used for advertising but for sending progress reports back to the child, parents and teachers. If the information could be anonymized and collected, it also could help the designers see how people play and solve problems — and ultimately let them improve the game or design new ones.