Excellent math education game. Simply brilliant.

Most educational video games ---especially most math education games ---take routine classroom exercises and tack on some totally extraneous eye candy, sound-effects, and/or "blast-the-aliens" action to make the exercises fun and exciting. First of all, this rarely works (most kids instinctively recognize bitter medicine in a sugar-coated pill; they arent fooled for very long). Second, the interactive video game component contributes nothing to the educational experience; it is just there as a "hook".

This game is different. It uses a simple "card-matching game" to teach basic algebraic manipulation techniques. The brilliance is that at first, it doesnt even look like you are doing algebra. The "cards" have pictures of funny grotesque little alien monsters. The game very gently eases the player into more and more complex card-matching puzzles (at every step, the rules are carefully explained in an interactve tutorial with simple language). Then at some point, some of the funny little monsters on the cards start to look more like numbers or letters. Then, somewhat later, the "dragon box" to which the player has been "feeding" the matched cards gets replaced with the symbol "x". Then finally, the partition of the playing screen into two halves gets replaced with an "=" sign. At this point, the player realizes that all this time, when playing the card-matching game, she has actually been "solving for x". She has just learned basic algebra ---without even knowing it.

The brilliance is the recognition that basic algebra IS just a game where you manipulate tokens to create certain patterns (i.e. to isolate the unknown variable on one side of the equation). If these tokens are called "x", "y", "z", "2", "3", and "5", then people are afflicted with math anxiety and algebra seems really hard. But if the tokens are pictures of funny little monsters, then suddenly its just a simple puzzle game, which even a child can play.

Aesthetically, the game design hits the bulls eye. The artwork is in a whimsical cartoon style, with monstrous creatures which are simultaneously grotesque and ridiculous, and which kids will find very funny and appealing. It is deliberately gender-neutral; there is no pinky frou-frou princess stuff or hard-hitting macho man stuff which panders to one gender stereotype while repulsing the other one. The game is designed to encourage relaxed contemplation; there are no time limits, the music is cheerful but soothing, and the player is rewarded with pleasant but not explosive visual effects when she makes progress in the game.

If I was a prize committee, this game would win "Best math game ever."

Marcus Pivato about DragonBox Algebra 5+, v1.1.1