MathsLinks

In Monster School Bus, students play a newly hired bus driver with a certain number of seats on the bus. The mission: to pick up each neighborhood’s little monsters and bring them to school – without dividing up groups (monsters don’t like that).
In early levels, each little monster takes up one seat and players combine integers to add up to 10. Each new neighborhood exposes learners to a more complex set of numbers, including decimals and fractions.

The design of characters and locations gives the game an edgy look, and provides a more mature atmosphere to a game covering fairly juvenile content (e.g., buildings transform into punk Monster Buildings as a reward for picking up kids). This is important: though students learn this concept of number chunking in earlier grades, they often fail to understand it conceptually. Therefore, this content could turn off older students if they feel the game is “below them.” The edgy character design helps make the content feel more age-appropriate, and the graphical details impact gameplay and motivate players to visualize numbers as sets and quantities and think harder about relationships among numbers and number systems.

 

17 July 2015 Edit: 14 March 2020