Kelsey Scheurich
Opening screen of the Maths Racer program
Maths Racer
Hillcrest High School
Year 11 ICT, full-year project
Teacher : Jenny Baker
Alerted to the need for more well-designed computer resources to meet the educational needs of young people, both at home and school, Kelsey decided to design and build a basic maths times-tables program for her younger sister and her Year 5-6 class at Matangi Primary School.
After extensive consultation with her stakeholder group, showing them concepts for 'Maths Racer', 'Maths Baseball', 'Maths Soccer' and a game where a bird gets eaten by a crocodile when the wrong answers were given, Kelsey settled on Maths Racer as having the best concepts and being the most realistic.
In her initial concept for the game, users choose their car and race against a friend or other cars in order, after successfully negotiating the 10 levels of difficulty, to win a cup. The faster questions are answered, the faster the car goes. The user can request a hint if they get stuck. Traffic cones can be placed in front of your car by rivals – hit it and you have to answer a bonus question.
After extensive research, including graphic and interface design, useability, health and safety issues, and learning the programming language Visual Basic, and continual stakeholder consultation, Kelsey's final brief was slightly less ambitious. She pared down the game to four levels, and had the cars are running out of petrol and needing to get to the station before the others. Kelsey also included a good Help section and credits page.
The end result is a highly attractive and well-designed piece of interactive software that received excellent feedback from her stakeholder class. One comment: "The whole game is cool. I think it will help most of our class. It's brilliant. You are a super genius!"
Teacher comment
Kelsey has produced a game that has excellent graphics that will appeal to both boys and girls. It provides increasing levels of difficulty that challenges users to act and think quickly. Kelsey has worked hard to produce a very good product. She has consulted well, particularly with her user group stakeholders who enjoyed working with her and with whom she has been well prepared and given clear instructions.