Carleton University - School of Computer Science Honours Project
Fall 2017
Assessing the Educational Value of an Equation Solving Mobile Game
James Paisley
SCS Honours Project Image
ABSTRACT
The objective of my project was to create an app that would be able to improve the user's ability to solve math equations quickly and accurately. To test this, I first created a game. I then created two quizzes, Quiz 1 and Quiz 2, that I used to test participants. I recruited student participants via email, then split them up into two groups. I had my variable group take Quiz 1, then play my game for 10 minutes, then complete Quiz 2. I had my control group do something unrelated to math for 10 minutes between taking the two quizzes. To check the validity of my hypothesis, I compared the time taken to complete and the amount of correct answers of the two quizzes. I found that the use of my game did indeed decrease the time taken on Quiz 2 by almost a minute on average. The control group only had a decrease of about 1 second on average. Therefore, my hypothesis that my game would improve the user's ability to solve math equations quickly was correct. Unfortunately, there was no statistically significant difference between the control group and the variable group when comparing the quiz scores between the two quizzes. Therefore, my hypothesis about the accuracy improvement was incorrect.