Students as Math Level Designers: Exploring how students become motivated through design of a math learning game

The short paper presents preliminary findings from a pilot study on how students become motivated through design of learning games in math. The research is carried out in a Danish public school with two classes of 5th graders (N = 42 students). Over the course of two weeks, the students work with a design template for a runner game in the Unity 3D game design engine. The students are introduced to the concept of “flow” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1991) as a game design principle and are asked to design levels for a math runner game, which are both engaging as well as a meaningful way of learning math. In this way, the students are positioned as “math level designers”, which means that they both have to redesign the difficulty of the runner game as well as the difficulty of the mathematical questions and possible answers.