This brief video shows the functioning of the game – when an answer is correct, the numbers are shown being added together and being compared to one another to show that they are the same. This is designed to reinforce the relationship between the numbers in a number bond equation.
“Number Bonds” was a teaching concept new to me when I started the design of this game – this wasn’t taught when I was in elementary school! I needed to do some research, and talk to folks with more teaching experience to get a better grasp on this concept and why it is taught in schools.
I wanted to focus on showing how these diagrams illustrate that a number can be divided into a sum of separate numbers in several different ways (for instance, a 5 can be made up of a 4 plus a 1, or a 2 plus a 3.)
This wireframe was created to show the basic game layout:
Number bonds are tidy illustrations of a larger number being broken up into two numbers. I made some diagrams to share with the developer how I wanted the diagram to animate when the students gets an answer correct – first, showing that the two bottom numbers add together to equal the top number, and then overlapping the numbers to reinforce that they are the same – and finishing with a number of stars (to show that the number 5 equals 5 “things.”
As a clue, numbers could be shown as dots to help the student imagine the concept that a number represents a certain quantity of “things.”
I put together a chart for the developers showing the content for this game.
A sequel (Extreme Number Bonds) was created to show number bond equations with more branches – for students in need of an extra challenge.