Exciting. Free The Balloon had its first review from iGameMom. Check it out below:
http://igamemom.com/2013/08/12/free-app-a-fun-skip-counting-game/
http://igamemom.com/2013/08/12/free-app-a-fun-skip-counting-game/
Free the captured balloons by blowing them through hoops in the right order. Skip-Count was designed to engage primary aged school children and teach a foundational math skill: skip counting! Skip-Count facilitates the learning of skip counting by: 1's, 2's, 3's, 5's, 10's, and 25's. The game has been validated and proven to teach the above math skills by an educational psychologist and elementary school teachers
Monday 12 August 2013
Thursday 1 August 2013
How Free The Balloon Came To Be!
Our goal is to help educate the future generations around the world through creating tools/apps for parents and teachers to utilize. We are focusing on foundational math concepts and have examined curricula from around the world for learning outcomes to gamify. Let me explain a bit of our story.
Kids are unintentionally ruthless and they will simply tell you what they think. This is very help to the game development process if you are able to overcome the pain of game testing. Adults are normally more polite about their critiques. Before you are at the scary game testing stage you need to discover a concept or learning outcome in the educational system that is possible to gamify.
The area of mathematics was chosen because we thought we would have a good chance of gamifying something in this field. We sat in on a few elementary math lessons at a local school to get a feel for what kids found fun (with principal approval of course!). The teacher was covering the topic of skip counting (counting by 2's ,3's ,4's ,5's ,10's , and 25's) and we thought we could gamify this idea. Skip counting is a foundational math skill. So with the the learning outcome established we went back to the office and started working on a prototype.
We also polled the grade 3 students what their favourite and least favourite mobile games were. The answered did not really surprise us. Favourite mobile games: dragon gem, angry birds space, four pictures, tiny towers, and ski safari etc; but, the kids unanimously said their least favoured games were education games. The optimists we are--saw this as a need. We kept this in the back of our minds as we developed Free The Balloon because we desired to make something engaging, fun and educational.
After drinking from a fire house for six months (learning the new trade of game development) we came back to the classroom with our first version of the game. We gathered feedback and many more times brought in new versions of the game to be tested. We had the opportunity to watch kids play and hear their candid responses to Free The Balloon. It was a great feeling watching kids play and learn. After many iterations and reworks of the game we built a game that kids loved and parents are happy with.
We left tablets in the classroom for kids to play the Free The Balloon on. They were able to play if they were done there math work. Kids would rush their work and actually fight over the few tablets to play the game. Kids were fighting to play a game which is educational foundational. It appears possible to create educationally games that are fun and addicting AND again EDUCATIONAL!
We hope you like Free The Balloon too, which is free on both Android and Apple.
Let us know how we could make it better and email us: support[@]forsetidigital.com or leave comments below. Thanks for reading this far.
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