June 2025 Update
This month’s update showcases the excellent work done by our volunteer collaborators from the University of Aalborg Master’s in Mediaology (yes - that’s what they call the course!)
They were given completely free rein to review the full range of suggestions for new mini-games designed by students from the maths department of the University of Leicester and choose to develop a proof of concept version of a mini-game that we might consider for inclusion in Pizza Maths VR.
Creating games that not only enable learners tackling GCSE maths (or IB / SAT equivalent subjects) to improve their familiarity with core syllabus topics, but are also fun to play and therefore get students to willingly come back again and again, is not straightforward.
It is all too easy to create something that is EITHER genuinely fun to play OR delivers on giving learners practice on typical GCSE maths topics, but rarely both.
Whether or not our “vikings” (as we affectionately call them internally at BMVR) have pulled off this rare feat is for you to judge.
This month’s update showcases their hard work in creating a candidate Proof of Concept (PoC) mini-game for a gap identified by our Uni of Leicester student collaborators’ analysis of maths topics in which historic GCSE exam results indicate that learners find tough to learn by standard methods year after year i.e. rearranging the formula for calculating the volume of a cylinder.
In this case the challenge is to: a) calculate the area of the pizza, b) measure the pizza’s volume by dipping it in a special space-aged liquid and c) calculating the height of the pizza box that must be constructed to contain said pizza perfectly (with zero cardboard waste!)
So what did you think? Is this game good enough for inclusion in the forthcoming release of Pizza Maths VR later this year? Would you play it? If you’re a teacher, would your students engage with this? If you’re a parent of teenagers, would your kids do more maths homework if this was how they learned? Answer on a postcard to this email address please: www.brainmanvr.co.uk/contact-us
