Treballs Finals de Grau d'Enginyeria Informàtica, Facultat de Matemàtiques, Universitat de Barcelona, Any: 2016, Director: Anna Puig Puig
Learning by doing. Many studies claim that the best way of teaching is by making the students interact with what they want to learn. Accordingly, this Bachelor’s Degree Final Project aims to provide teachers with an aiding tool, specifically in
the field of geometry teaching during the last years of primary school. Thus, the main goal is to design and create a game using Unity with a series of geometry learning activities allowing students in primary and first years of secondary school
to progress in an entertaining and engaging way, having them overcome several challenges.
Each student will have their own user and the game will be flexible enough to enable the teacher to analyze their evolution and to identify their difficulties. The teacher will also be able to customize the game, choosing which skills to train, and
adding new activities and new 2D and 3D shapes among other geometric concepts.
Thus, the game will consist of a series of campaigns that the students will have to finish in order to obtain complex 3D objects from simpler three-dimensional shapes. To gain them, it will be necessary to get first some 2D shapes through a series of level-adjusted missions, chosen according to the student’s acquired competences and which, in practice, will become ever more complex. Once this is accomplished, the game enters a second phase in which these flat shapes must be combined to get, through unfoldings, basic 3D objects. The performance speed and the mistakes made will be taken into account in order to achieve the campaign goals.
With this in mind, it has been necessary to split the project into two separate End of Bachelor Degree Projects, developed and coordinated by two students (D. Rausell and S. Cebrián) who worked as a team in the integration phase of the
different parts of the game, and individually in the parts related to the 2D game and the unfolding game (2D-3D), respectively. The final project, therefore, has been divided in three sections:
• Common game parts (designed and developed by D. Rausell and S. Cebrián): game design, specification of the game campaigns and their attributes, working mechanics, design of user interaction, menu management and data
persistence for users and campaigns.
• 2D game (designed and developed by D. Rausell). This section is devoted to the competences of identification of 2D shapes and their properties, such as symmetries, angles, perimeters and areas. Each player has a competence level
which will increase as the game progresses and missions get accomplished, taking also into account the degree of accuracy and the completion time.
• 2D-3D game and polyhedron unfolding (designed and developed by S. Cebrián). This section deals mainly with spatial intelligence and different polyhedron nets. It also deals with the identification of 3D objects and their relationship to 2D shapes. The player must present a valid net for a given elemental polyhedron and is rewarded according to the completion time and the amount of mistakes made.