Brain Pop's movies. games and math

So this week we're taking on the M in the STEM subjects -> Math. There are many digitalized media out there that claim to teach you math and BrainPop is one of them.

I decided to watch a short animation about polygons. I was never a math person myself but I like those short clips that BrainPop makes, even if I think they are always a bit too fast. Slowing it down could be better for novice learners.

From the animation I went to the recommended game section, where games that something to do with polygons, have been pre-searched for me. There are 8 games that the website states have polygons in them and since there are no indications as to what they actually do (or for what age) I just clicked one of them.

As I didn't really understand the mission in this game and found no help section I decided to skip it. The only connection to polygons were that the robots were shaped like that.

I picked Pyramid Panic instead. And I did panic a little bit at first, seeing as I was eaten by some mummy creature after 20 seconds in the easiest level. But it's a trial and error while figuring out the rules. Thankfully I could just start again (because mummies apparently have a couple of lives) and look at the instructions.

I had to look at the rules several times before I got it, and then I had to look at them some more because geometrics are not really my thing.

The mummy is trying to get through the maze and uses geometric shapes of different size to get to the next safe place by building steps. The colored circles, drops etc. on the way represent points I can collect. The read line next to the mummy represents the red line in the geometric shape I have to select. To find that I have to look at the white lines that have the length on them. I also have to be aware of the way the red line is pointing when I make my selection because if it's aimed too high or too low I might end up bumping my head in the ceiling or in the volcano pit.

You're suppose to be able to fight off the evil mummy beast, but that was one of the many things I couldn't figure out.

When I went up a level (medium and hard) I immediately ran into problems because the math was just to hard for me to recall in 20 seconds.

There are a few things I noticed in this game. You can change the color of the line from red to blue. Wonder what the thinking is behind that. Also, I find it odd that they would pick a math game that had meters in it, instead of inches or feet seeing as BrainPop is mostly used in the United States.

Control of Pace - No
Reviews/Help - Yes and no (needed some scaffolding)
Ability to Backtrack - Yes
Levels of Difficulty - Yes (three)
Physical Interface - No
Speech Features - No
Childproof - Yes

Individual Use - Yes
Use with Pairs/Small Groups - Yes
Printer Use - No
Test/Recordkeeping/Game Save feature - No
Add-on Option-Can incorporate user content - No
Scaffolding - No

In relation to the polygons animation this game was not really related, except by the fact that it had some polygons in it. And it's understandable that it's hard to link that kind of informational video to a game.

Seeing as the games page is an aggregated project it's no wonder the games related to the topic are all so different. It would be a reasonable next step for BrainPop to issue some kind of style guide that all the games had to fulfill, e.g. in the terms of scaffolding and help.