A toolkit for presenting advanced mathematics in serious games

Serious games are now considered to be an effective way for students to learn and have continued to gain popularity among educators. While a wide variety of serious games have been developed for other fields, there are few games for mathematics in higher education. One of the challenges that must be overcome during game development for mathematics is symbolic expression manipulation and display. This paper discusses the development of a toolkit that allows for the manipulation and display of symbolic expressions. Several open source mathematics libraries written in Python programming language were selected and utilized. We then developed a toolkit in the form of a C# dynamically linked library (DLL) that provides an intuitive and unified interface for commonly used mathematics functionalities needed by serious games, simplifying installation and software development. The developed toolkit has been utilized in a serious game for STEM education.