KEYWORDS: Edutainment, interface design, computers in education, motivation, games, mathematics, children

ABSTRACT: This paper presents preliminary findings on the design and use of Counting on Frank, a CD-ROM math adventure for ages 8-12 published by EA Kids in late 1994. Obtained primarily from log-file data on home and school use, and from classroom observations, our results provide insight on some common issues in edutainment design and use.

INTRODUCTION: Counting on Frank (CoF) is the first commercial product resulting from the Electronic Games for Education in Math and Science collaboration between researchers in computer science and education, teachers, and commercial game developers. In CoF the player's goal is to help a boy, Henry, and his dog Frank, win a contest to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar (different each time the game is played) by collecting clues as the reward for solving mathematical word problems. The main educational activities in CoF are solving the word problems, using the clues to determine the number of jellybeans, and playing four other mathematical strategy games (mathgames), each with several variants. The primary entertainment elements are the "click-ons" in each of the eight main scenes in CoF, i.e. objects that when clicked on, trigger a humorous animation that is generally unrelated to the educational activities. Other non-educational entertainment elements include animation sequences as rewards for correct answers to word-problems, humorous dialogue by the main characters, etc. Of course, many children found playing the mathgames and other educational activities entertaining as well. As is common in edutainment products, throughout the development of CoF conflict and tension arose in attempting to simultaneously meet the product's entertainment and educational goals. This paper reports on the merit of some of the design choices that were made, as well as the general effectiveness of CoF. These topics are discussed [1,2,3] in more detail.

CONCLUSION: General successes in CoF include: players spend a good balance of time between education and entertainment, it is attractive to most girls and boys in the 8-12 age range, and it exposes children to a wide range of content that is recognizable to them as mathematics. Given our findings on patterns of play, it seems likely that CoF's attractiveness is related to its wide range of activities, and the freedom to move among them at will. In terms of specific educational goals, the clue design seems to work particularly well. Its positive features include the large number of possible solutions (15,000) and the types of clues (e.g. "number is less than x", " number does not have an x", and "if number was shared equally among x kids there would be y left over" ). Reflection on the underlying mathematical concepts (inequalities, number patterns, modular equivalences) is stimulated by several design elements such as giving redundant clues, limiting the number of clues that can be saved, and providing a number line visualization of the impact of clues to assist in determining the solution (see [2]). We also found that the mathgames are attractive in their own right, and provide excellent contexts for classroom projects that engage children in deep mathematical thinking (see [1]). Our main question is to what degree CoF contributes positively (and measurably) to mathematics learning when it is used in isolation, since in our controlled school sessions the students doing worksheets showed greater performance gains than those using CoF, and we found no significant changes in attitudes towards mathematics. There are many factors that could explain this (e.g. the performance tests were almost identical to the worksheets, and the pre-test performance and attitude results were sufficiently high that the results may be subject to ceiling effects). On the other hand our classroom observations indicate a number of other design elements that may limit CoF's effectiveness as a stand-alone educational tool for learning how to solve word problems, as opposed to one for practising doing word problems. These elements include the limited number (< 150) and variety (~20) of word problems to solve, the lack of incentives to move on to the harder levels of the game, the lack of informative help when errors are made, and the absence of activities that would engage children in more thoughtful exploration of word problems.