Mobylize

NumberPower: $100K Challenge Grand Prize Winner

Derek Lomas loved playing the game Battleship as a kid. Although he didn't know it at the time, the hours spent in front of a Battleship board helped him build confidence with numbers and ultimately develop more advanced math skills.

Now, as a PhD student at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, Lomas wants to help lower income children – who typically have less exposure to numbers – develop the skills for enhancing their own number sense.

The 29-year-old Lomas is currently leveraging Marvell's Mobylize platform to create a series of multi-touch educational games that enable children to gain proficiency with numbers. His first effort is called Battleship Numberline.

Similar to the classic board game, players seek to destroy enemy ships by figuring out their location on a number line. In this game, the invisible ships are anchored between two end points, like 0 and 100. Players are then given a numeric value and have to tap on the screen where they think the ships are located. Players see a bomb drop on the location they selected. And, if they choose correctly, the ship explodes and sinks.

Lomas admits the game will never rival the popularity of Grand Theft Auto. But that's not the point. The goal, he explains, is to inspire students to understand the power of numbers and to develop a sense of confidence when dealing with them. "Improving your ability to estimate along a number line correlates with math performance all the way up to the sixth grade," he says.

The game is also useful as a resource for teachers, allowing them to easily individualize instruction for students based upon their observations and assessments. Teachers can use the dashboard features to adjust the game's difficulty levels and time limits for a specific student or class.

The app is proving to be a great fit for the tablet platform. "The ability to touch where you think the battleship is (located), rather than moving a mouse, is a tremendous advantage," says Lomas. "The game is a lot more fun when you have that direct tactile experience." He adds that unlike other math games that are used in classrooms, the connectivity of an Android tablet enables a rich stream of data to be collected from each student's performance.

Lomas is extremely proud to be associated with the Mobylize movement, which is dedicated to bringing powerful and affordable tablet computers to every school across the United States. "Marvell is doing great things for the future of education by seeding a development community for educational apps," he says. "Our presence on the Mobylize platform gives us the opportunity to reach as many students as possible and really make a transformative impact."