Monster Math – Grade 3 game
itunes.apple.com
itunes.apple.com
We've worked hard to craft this app; it combines beautiful artwork, hilarious animations, an engaging story line, and a pretty unique game play. We've play-tested it with kids from different countries, ruthlessly removing all frustrations and building an experience that makes kids smile. While doing Math!
The app is $2.99.
This is currently available in India and Canada - if you are not in these countries, please visit http://www.makkajai.com and register so we can notify you once it is available in your country.
Feedback is welcome. Thanks.
Be Awesome,
Roopesh
1. Doing some experiments on the marketing side, especially keywords, before launching everywhere. The first week/month on the app store gives a boost to keyword rankings that can be leveraged to build good traction. Unfortunately it also requires some experimenting to get them right, so this initial launch in 1-2 countries can provide that data.
2. Building some traction and credibility so that when we launch on the other app stores, we can build on that (for e.g. #1 on the Canadian App store would have a nice charm to it, if we achieve it!). This again helps with point 1 (better traction in launch week/month).
3. Ensuring Support is not overwhelmed by unforeseen issues. We have tested a lot, but never know what kind of crashes or even minor bugs might be seen in the wild. We want to be awesome at customer experience.
4. Gathering feedback in general.
Another mystery resolved!
Thanks for the question.
We realised that getting kids excited about the game is the first step to getting them to play it. Especially when they have blockbuster options like Subway Surfer, Plants vs. Zombies, Temple run or even 100s of well-crafted indie games, it's hard to get them to play math games if they are not fun. A lot of math games are also just flash cards or questions retrofitted into normal games.
Our main aim was to bridge this gap - we wanted to build something that is just as engaging, just as fun as a real game - but also something that helps kids practice arithmetic and actually enjoy it.
The game also (non-intrusively) tracks kids' progress so parents and teachers can know exactly what skills they are struggling with.
Monster Math also includes Scaffolding - it guides kids to the right answers when they struggle, or tells them what they got wrong.
We've seen kids getting a lot faster at mentally calculating basic arithmetic problems with just a week of game play. We have not done a formal benchmarking on this yet (so I can't prove it in numbers yet), but we plan to do one soon.
And yes, this is just the beginning - we want to add lots of learning content too; something that will help us take corrective action from right within the game with explanatory animations. We've already started chalking out some of those features, and there's just so much work to be done!
Why not save that for the description and just keep the name as Monster Math?
To be honest, we are still not sure we want to keep it this way - I know the name sounds a bit spammy, but then it helps us rank better on those search-keywords (and also have more keywords outside of the name).
Do you have any experience on this trade off? I'd love to hear others' view on this.