Math Arcade

I know this has some very elementary information, however i think a couple of the idea's couple be very useful.
This game consists of several games within a game. I thought this was a great idea to keep the player engaged, because they were striving towards more than one goal here - if they are succeed in playing the game (know the material) than they move forward on the board (a kind of reward).
Donna, we had also talked about possibly being able to pick a your character at the beginning of the game (* or &)....In this game is allows you to pick your own piece to move along the board. Here, there is no real meaning to the item you chose to represent yourself - but for our game, your choice of character would really play a large roll in the game-play.

Letting the player choose their skill level is also something we could think about later on....

All these games a fairly short, but might provide us with some good ideas for certain parts of our game, or ways to gain points, etc...

The first game Bumble Numbers:
This idea would work very well with our concepts we are trying to get across - addresses and their content. There was a nice balance between the importance of the material and the game (even though it was pretty simple and less challenging compared to what we are looking to do)., The goal was to retrieve and integer from a cloud, and to drop it onto the correct mathematical equation. We might want to think about doing something similar, maybe for one section of the game you may need to be able to determine the address of a certain variable to pass to a certain level (given only a section of code - including the declaration and assignment of a pointer to that variable).
Round 2:
This was much more challenging, but the same idea.....One thing that is quite engaging about these games is the artwork. The characters are very 'cute' - cartoon-like , and there is always a new characters come the next game.
One thing I noticed is that the obstacles do not fly around randomly, and they don't follow you around, but they fly on a set path. We might want to think about executing some obstacles, in later level, that follow the users character (to increase the difficulty).

Moon Rocks:
There is no need to know the material for this game, so it is not too relevant. It is simply matching up the numbers.

Pig Toss:
This game is also quite i also quite irrelevant to the material at hand (math). It consists of getting a pig at the right height and distance so a character catches it on the other side.

Math Basketball:
This game requires the player to know the material, however it does not offer any other challenges. The bumble Number game at least offered some object to try and avoid.

Inkster:
I enjoyed this game, just like the first one. It's about the same idea: matching the integer answer to the mathematic equation. However, in this game, there is a choice of answers to one single equation. This was a little more difficult to control because there was a slight delay of when you hit the key and the character moved. I would probably be best to avoid any kind of unnecessary kinks like that so it won't add to the players frustration discourage them form playing.
Also, we both found that the correct answers we not necessarily randomly placed. The correct answers seemed to always be in the same spot.

Mummy hunt:
This game was - i believe - the game that was probably impossible to pass without knowing the material. The idea I liked the most about this was the "To be continued". This adds mystery and motivates the player keep playing and pass the next levels to figure out what is in the pyramid. If we could add an element like this to our game, I think i would push the player to move forward instead to giving up.
Note: One observation made was that the questions given become easier to easier to solve if the game notice you getting worse. I'm not sure if we are able to incorperate that kind of AI into out game, but it is worth thinking about.


Revealer:
This game was not as engaging and entertaining as the previous ones. It required you to know all material, however was just a simple question and answer session. I don't think it is completely out of the question to put a couple of formal code questions in our game, maybe we could think about just placing them at points in the game where the player needs to over come a large hurdle to move up in the game (maybe to complete a level?)

Puzzler:
This game consisted of sticking numerical value in accending order. This could be something to consider when we thing of physical locations of memory blocks ( sticking the correct value into consecutive physical memory locations). The content of the memory spaces to choose from could be in different forms (short pieces of code, which assigning the correct value to a variable).