A Mobile Educational Game Design for Eliminating Math Anxiety of Middle School Students

All over the world and especially in Turkey, the success level regarding math is well below the desired rate. The main reasons for this situation are negative attitudes and anxiety towards math. It is observed that the students and the teachers experience anxiety about the Arithmetic Operations, which is one of the beginning subjects of math. On the other hand, it is stated in the literature that educational games can be used to eliminate anxieties about math. In this context, an educational math game, which can be used on mobile devices, was tried to be developed in this study in order to reach more users. The product obtained as a result of this study, which was realized according to the design and development research method, was evaluated by 69 middle school students taking classes in city of Van in Turkey. In the evaluation, it was seen that the students gave positive opinions about the game developed. The students stated that they thought the application was highly interesting and could contribute to their math successes. After the evaluation process, the application was put into use around the world and it was installed on 6500 devices from 180 different countries in a three-month period. It was observed that the number of users who did not delete the game after installing and kept it on their device is 2735. Therefore, it is thought that the product developed as a result of the research can serve its purpose.