Eating Pizza to learn fractions

Mathematics is often a hard subject for children, especially because they are usually not able to perceive any concrete connection between math and the real world. There is a rift between what they do for fun ad what they are required to do at school. This is partially due to the concrete aspects of the activities they do in those two contexts, which are inherently different of course. But it is also due to a deep difference in the means which are used since children prefer to learn from pictures, sounds and videos, as some recent studies have shown. For this reason, we implemented “Pizza al Lancio”, a serious game to help children understand fractions, in particular equivalent and complementary fractions. The game tells the story of a hungry delivery boy who happens to eat some slice of pizza while transporting it, and so he asks the player for help in order to avoid delivering incomplete pizzas. The game has been tested with two groups of primary school pupils. © 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.