Villainy,+Inc.

Villainy, Inc.





I first discovered Villainy, Inc. as a suggested math educational game for English Language Learner (ELL) students. The reason was that it had a lot of language, both spoken and written, and with the help from the team members, there was extra explanation with differing vocabulary as well as visual aids. I wonder about this though because of the accents of some of the characters. It might be enough to confuse an ELL student. I like After the Storm a lot better for ELL students.

There were things that I liked and things that I didn't like about this game. It reminded me a bit of the math education TV show, CyberChase, which was an amazing math show for kids. Both involve using math to solve missions. The premise for this game was that the player was a double agent, using math to solve problems for a villain but actually meeting the requirements of their own organization. It is a fun storyline and there were good characters, graphics, and voices. I like that the math missions were word problems and contained multiple steps. This is something that is much different from the usual drill found in the math games my daughter plays at school. Word problems are definitely an area where kids can struggle and there were several areas of help available to them including the step by step instructions and the team members. I like how each team member had an different approach to giving help so that they didn't just repeat each other.

I found it pretty annoying listening to Dr. Wick and Platypus. There was a lot of story that was non-essential and actually pretty annoying. But maybe the kids like it. My 11 year old daughter joined me as I was playing so I let her do the math. She found the narrative long as well. Once there my daughter did the math problems pretty easily but she did use the help for hints once or twice. She's an advanced math student and probably above the level they are looking for in this game. I could see where other students would probably get stuck and I found the help to be pretty on target. The style of teaching really includes a good bit of scaffolding including checklists, examples, immediate feedback, and rewording the problem in different ways. It uses the Explicit Information On-Demand and Just-In-Time Principle with the advice from team members on how to solve the problem at hand. It uses the Discovery Principle by allowing the user to try several things and gives feedback on the results. The Multimodal Principle is used by offering help from team members in different presentations and styles. It offers the use of a calculator, maybe considered "Material Intelligence" Principle because the use of a calculator frees the user from arithmetic so they can concentrate on the problem solving. There is a little bit of Practice Principle going on as well, not as much as a drilling math game, but each problems usually involves about five sets of data so they do the same steps five times. Finally, it is Active, Critical Learning because if requires the player to figure out how to solve the problem, with the help given but you cannot proceed without figuring out the steps and doing the math.

The reward in the game is to make it to the next step and complete the story and thwart the evil villains. If a student finds the math difficult, I think a teacher might have to offer other incentives to complete it. Maybe work it into their classroom reward system. I could see a student giving up rather than doing all the math unless they had enough incentive. I do think there is good support for the students to get help though.