TAKE some quirky aliens, oddly shaped spaceships, elusive interstellar settings and simple maths equations and what do you get? An educational yet entertaining mathematics mobile gaming app for elementary schoolchildren.

Dubbed Zap Zap Fractions, this mobile app is the brainchild of Malaysia-based gaming startup, Visual Math Interactive. The nifty game is a freemium gamified maths app targeted at first graders or Standard One students. It teaches students basic fractions by using aliens and asteroid-infested intergalactic virtual environments to solve maths problems.

“The idea derives from the impression that maths is an ‘alien’ language for some,” says co-founder Ng Wei Chong.

Before venturing into the tech world eight years ago, Ng worked as a maths tutor in Malaysia and Singapore. The 34-year-old was unimpressed with the existing educational tools as they failed to motivate students to excel in the subject. That prompted him to start his own edutainment website, Math Expression, which offers online tutoring as well as mobile apps.

In January 2013, he moved to 1337 Accelerator, a startup incubator where he met Zap Zap Fractions’ other two co-founders, Joann Soon and Goh I-Ming. With seed funding of RM 50,000, they launched Visual Math Interactive.

Weird as it sounds, Zap Zap Fractions actually makes learning maths entertaining!

The only way to survive the game is by diligently manoeuvring through an asteroid field by answering the ensuing barrage of fraction-related questions correctly and fast. If you respond too slowly or answer incorrectly, the asteroids will obliterate your spaceship.

The interface is simple and pretty easy to use.

Now, the goal is to create more fun and visually engaging educational video games.

According to Ng, Visual Math Interactive recently secured funding from Netrove, a venture capital and corporate finance advisory firm, to help develop more content that will cover a wide range of maths topics, including algebra and geometry.

The hope is to turn Zap Zap Fractions into a full-length game called Zap Zap Math, targeting a wider audience, specifically students aged 7 to 12. It is expected to be priced from US$99 when released by year-end.

“We see Zap Zap Fractions as a platform to help address the decreasing number of quality educators. We want to help people have access to education as cheaply and fast as possible all over the world,” says Ng.

Since its launch, Zap Zap Fractions has garnered over 400,000 downloads, targeting mainly the US and English-speaking markets. Ng jokes that the app received close to no downloads on the home front.

“Our endgame is that education should be made available to everyone because I find tuition classes getting more expensive everyday. It is a problem,” he says.

The fractions

Like any other fresh startup, the biggest hurdle is surviving with very little money. Before securing funding from Netrove, the three founders had to depend on a lot of bootstrapping and taking huge pay cuts.

Ng reveals that one of the founders had to leave the startup as she could not cope with the financial constraints. Since securing the funding, Ng and Goh have hired six people to help with designing, marketing and gathering more content for Zap Zap Math.

“When we started, there were three of us. Our former colleague came up with the idea. She left because it’s a real financial burden to be in a startup. But she helped us to get here, so we really appreciate her work,” Ng says.

“She’s the writer, and came up with the idea. She finds that maths is alien, an alien language, but we don’t want it to be alien anymore, so all these cute alien characters sort of teach us the alien maths language.”

According to Goh, Zap Zap Fractions appeals to young gamers as because of its mix of quality educational content and video game elements.

“There are two types of competitors: one makes really engaging games but only has a small slice of content while the other has a lot of content but the games are pretty boring. Our selling point is the intersection between the engaging game and the content,” he explains.

However, it’s about the quality of the content more than the gamification, Ng says. While users love the idea of playing games, Ng and Ming don’t want to emphasise so much on the game because their main objective is education.

Designing and developing fun games is challenging and creating an appealing and fun educational game is hard.

But why maths? Designing a game is complicated, but so is maths to many people. “It started from my passion — I love maths!” Ng says with a laugh.

He believes his passion is what drove him to create the app. He disagrees with the notion that most people find maths stressful. Students, he says, feel excited to find the answers to maths equations once they understand the concept.

“You have to encourage the students to think that maths is not difficult. Once they understand the concepts, they find that it all links together, and can see the big picture, so they get excited. They will then have the initiative to get more into maths. I saw that when I was teaching, even among the underperforming students,” he says.

Relying solely on developing maths games would not be viable in the long run and the two-founders have plans to branch out into other subjects. Next would be developing educational science video games, although there are no concrete plans as yet.

They would also be interested in inking partnerships with other companies to translate and localise their products in other regions, such as Japan.  

This article first appeared in #edGY, The Edge Malaysia Weekly, on June 8 - 14, 2015. Read more here

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