Hoodies and Barrels: Using a Hide-and-seek Ubiquitous Game to Teach Mathematics

Many children\´s games have a universal, cross-cultural appeal and have been played for hundreds of years, suggesting a developmental need for them. This paper presents a framework for leveraging this appeal and longevity by developing cognitive games based on popular playground games. This framework employs technology to maintain the physicality and embodied components of the game. The Prête-à-apprendre (PAP+) toolkit is used to develop an e-Textiles game for teaching concepts of estimations and number sense in Mathematics. The game consists of "hoodies" and "barrels" that communicate with each other using a low-power wireless network (Zigbee). Each "hoodie" contains an LED display to convey constraints to children while each barrel contains and Radio Frequency Identifier (RFID) reader to identify children. The game can be deployed in structured or unstructured environments. An evaluation of the pedagogical design of the game based on various intrinsic and extrinsic motivation criteria is also presented.