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Mathekton

Audience:

Tags: problem-solvinggame

Mathekton is a singleplayer game about creating and solving math problems. To guide you, a deck of 100 legendary mathematicians is presented to you. They will inspire you with themes to explore, and tips to help you further develop you problem-creating and problem-solving skills. The game requires you to use pen and paper, or or a note-taking software like Obsidian, to write down your problems and solve them. It is recommended that you are familiar with math proofs. Nonetheless, the only prerequisite is curiosity ! To demonstrate how it is is played, we show an example of a game in the following video : https://youtu.be/pPWjWNjSnhk

https://mathekton.netlify.app/

Analytics

4.5 Overall score*

59 Rank

7 Votes

6 Comments

Comments

3.9

The problems were mostly interesting to think about, but I couldn’t find a way to make any in-app progress on any of them. Apparently you had to move a problem to ‘in progress’ before you could do that, but I couldn’t find a button anywhere that would move any problem to ‘in progress’.

I think the concept is very unique, I really appreciate that it’s a project that in the long term benefits anyone that wants to improve their skills in the field.

Using games as a medium for mathematics is definitely interesting and worth exploring. However, this means that you should think about the project more from a game design perspective — in addition to the things you need to do for good mathematics education, all the principles of game design apply to you too.

For example, what is the gameplay loop for this game? Which part of the loop sets it apart and makes it more engaging than, say, browsing the math stackexchange and solving the problems there? You can try to compare this game to other single-player games like solitare, to see how it stands up. The idea of having famous mathematicians as cards has potential, but in my opinion it needs more fleshing out to make the mathematicians more relevant to the game.

I feel like the object of this game is to create your own problems rather than learn about concepts and skills. There is very little explanation for each skill, and it’s not the focus of the game. Often, the explanations use terms that need context to be explained, making the explanations difficult to understand if you have no (or very little) prior knowledge of the skill. Although the game is designed well and interesting to play, I think it misses the idea behind this contest: to explain math concepts, rather than having the audience explore them.

I think this is a good way to encourage people to explore their own questions, which may be too niche for the general math community.

6.6

Interesting and novel approach, really liked it. Site was a bit buggy on my phone though, I guess it is better on PC.