This game was created by Arwen Sadler as part of a summer spent researching math education and entertainment under Professor Kelsey Houston-Edwards at Olin College of Engineering. Through the research, we aimed to explore how learning math could be entertaining, fun, and effective for 4th through 8th grade learners. The Firefen Bandits is one of several projects created by student researchers that aims to put into practice what we learned and explore possibilities for learning math beyond traditional methods.
In our research, we found that both educational entertainment and successful learning involve giving learners a feeling of agency, incorporating a story or context to show purpose, and letting students explore open-ended questions and outcomes. Additionally, we found that while most educational entertainment excels at visual, aural, and verbal teaching styles, there are few that engage logical or tactile learning.
The Firefen Bandits is an attempt to create a kind of entertainment that gives players a sense of agency, incorporates a story, tackles open-ended problems, and engages logical and tactile learning. Players control characters in a fantasy world who are given a quest—a problem they must solve—and the players can choose to solve it (or not solve it!) in any way they want. With open-ended scenarios, and few limitations on what players can and can't do, players are encouraged to think creatively. Additionally, the game is played with a map and pieces, and players must think spatially about how they're going to execute their plans. The Firefen Bandits can be played remotely, however one person (the GM) will need to have a way to show the map where each character is standing in the environment and be able to update it in real time—an external webcam, or a smartphone on top of a stack of books pointing down toward a physical map are two possible solutions.
I've already started creating rules to expand the game into a more general system that players can use to create their own adventures, however, there is a lot of work to do still to make this happen.
Additionally, I may add sequel adventures and additional content (such as leveling up and more characters) onto The Firefen Bandits.
Finally, I'd like to investigate more ways in which I could better design this game to encourage and reward learning math. This would include a longer study following groups of play testers over time to see how they react to the content of the game, especially in a system where as characters level up they gain access to more powerful actions that involve harder math. I'd also like to more thoroughly investigate gameplay teaching kinds of math that students in the target age group (middle school) aren't generally exposed to, such as matrix operations.