Games and Learning

The Land of Venn seems to have done everything right, but still needs to add ads to make ends meet.

Search “math app” and a horde of results will flood your screen, most of them little more than elaborate flashcards apps that only allow young players to work on their plug ‘n chug problem-solving skills.

Most educators say it’s not enough to simply solve equations over and over until they become rote. Students, they argue, need to understand how and why numbers work together, why they’re solving the math problem in the first place, and when to use those skills unless they’re facing the exact same situation in the real world.  

Despite this, math apps that elegantly blend gameplay with increased numeracy are having a hard time elbowing their way past the featured flash card apps in digital app stores and rarely earn the same amount of parents’ attention and, more importantly, money, according to one developer who knows this struggle firsthand.

“I don’t want to complain; we’re doing better than many other developers. But sometimes I feel like an indie movie that critics love but no one comes to see,” said Eyal Dessou Tzafrir, co-founder of iMagine Machine, the Tel Aviv and Manhattan-based developer of the critically acclaimed Land of Venn series of apps.

Tzafrir said critics and teachers may have been generous with their praise, but profits have been harder to find, forcing iMagine Machine to change their business model for future games.

“Our games are clean. We’ve never had in-game purchases, but our next game will have ads,” Tzafrir said. “We put a lot of effort into our games, and we’re going to keep up the quality. I wish I didn’t need them, but it’s business, you know?”

iMagine Machine has raked in the awards and accolades from the Washington Post, USA Today, Common Sense Media and a dozen other tech sites and sales of their most critically lauded release, Land of Venn: Geometric Defense, are far from weak. Their tower defense game that uses lines, shapes and spells cracked the top 200-grossing educational apps for iPad last year.

You can see the degree to which Common Sense sees Land of Venn as a winner in this video about the core game mechanics:

Tzafrir said iMagine Machine has aggressively marketed their games, including their latest release Numeric Storm, to teachers and media through Facebook and Twitter, and spent a lot of energy personally working with educators with technical questions about implementing their games in the classroom. But profits haven’t been high enough to keep their games ad-free.

In part, Tzafrir and other developers we have talked with say this is because the market is saturated and there are few tools to separate the quality products from the inferior ones.

One of the culprits, more people are saying, are the app stores themselves. Fingers point to imprecise app categorizations, lack of research among consumers and parents, and copycat developers who flood the market with lower quality knockoffs of more successful predecessors.

Some tech sites recommend app seekers expand their search outside Apple’s App Store or Google Play for ideas. Smaller stores like MoboGenie usually carry curated lists, discounts and different featured apps. But some of these outlets also carry an increased risk of malware.

Meanwhile, Tzafrir said he and the rest of iMagine Machine will continue to try and make good educational apps despite the lack of love from parents. He said he’s not frustrated —this is business after all — but he had stark criticism for parents who put minimal effort into finding a good app for their kids.

I think a lot of people don’t care. They just give their 5-year-old kid whatever random game they download. As a developer we are facing that issue every time. A lot of teachers don’t know how to implement games, and they don’t know how to speak with parents. Parents don’t know where to download. Some read blogs, but some are left with what Apple recommends.

Eyal Dessou Tzafrir, co-founder of iMagine Machine.

Though reviews for Geometric Defense were mostly positive, some writers criticized the lack of choice in difficulty and a somewhat obtuse spell system. Tzafrir dismisses them as mostly frail assessments of children’s ability to figure things out for themselves.

“All these remarks came from adults not kids. We don’t like kids to be spoon-fed all the information. Kids have to be allowed to make mistakes.” Tzafrir believes it’s this kind of thinking that makes their games so much more effective that many other math apps.

Education groups like the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics would seem to agree.

In their series on introducing math concepts to students, Solomon Friedberg, chair of the mathematic department at Boston College, said learning math procedures might get students a good score on a test, but that’s not the same as using math in the real world.

“What Common Core is about, from kindergarten through the last year of high school, is learning math in a way that enables a student to encounter a new problem that they haven’t encountered before, and to apply the principles, ideas and computational skills that they’ve developed and solve that new problem,” Friedberg said.

“We are trying to solve something: the agony of being an idiot,” said Tzafrir. “The whole DNA of iMagine Machine is me being stupid. I’m 42, but when I was a kid, I was really bad in math. What do we do with the iPad, in democratic schools, it’s about, ‘how can we cultivate the creativity, curiosity and learning in kids?’ I see apps on the store, and it makes me happy that there are so many educational apps. But lots of [developers] think they’re making something different and they’re often all the same. There’s no middle ground. Where’s the innovation? Where’s the game? They’re worksheets. We try to make an impact on kids to play, give teachers a tool and not just another piece of crap on an iPad,” Tzafrir said.