Secret of the Numeras
Making math fluency practice not a chore
Secret of the Numeras is SplashLearn’s flagship learning product that students can access right from the home-screen of the app. Students from Grades 1 to 5 can practice and improve their math fact fluency through an immersive game with a big world, a rich story full of interesting characters, and hundreds of magical creatures to collect and befriend.
Roles and Responsibilities
Co-ordinated a team of 10 people across various domains. Aided in the Game Production by running the daily standup meetings
Designed the game end to end, including the core and outer game loops, narrative, level design, economy, spaced repetition algorithm, and UI
Worked closely with the Artists and Programmers to develop novel technological solutions like the Numera Fusion System and the Forest Tilemap Slicer.
Quick Look
To develop an engaging and effect Math Facts game, one must first understand the academic journey the user takes while becoming proficient in a math fact.
A Math Fact is used to refer to basic calculations that a kid must be fast and accurate in to learn higher order math. Ex: a kid be able to answer what 2 + 2 is quickly and accurately without resorting to primitive strategies like counting on fingers or using math manipulatives.
There are more than 400 Math Facts that a learner has to develop automaticity in, and they all start off the same way : depending on slow, inefficient strategies like counting on fingers. But as the learner becomes more competent in doing this, they start to internalise the fact as as whole, and can recall it at will.
This journey from basic familiarity to fluency is not a straight path ; Users might lose progress over time, and will have to be reintroduced to these facts regularly for them to develop permanent fluency.
In the Secret of the Numeras, we mapped the individual facts to magical creatures called Numeras. Kids could collect Numeras by mastering the fact associated with them.
We also mapped multiple mini-games onto the learner’s academic journey that would take them through the different stages of competency of a fact in an organised manner.
Finally, to maintain engagement across the many weeks it would take to gain proficiency in all facts, we introduced auxiliary game mechanics that included :
A vast open forest to explore with 10 interesting characters and their own unique storylines
A personal tablet that had a Numera encyclopedia to fill up. It also helped the users track active quests and inventory
Collect and Unlock 16 background songs from the artist SteviaSphere
A basic economy system with 3 currencies that brought more structure to user activities
