Gamifying Foundational STEM Skills

University education has always required numeracy and literacy to underpin development of higher-level knowledge and skills. In many countries, education policies have often followed transitory fashions, both in mathematics and language education, enfeebling potentially generations of their youth. The use of technological innovations can amplify or hinder the development of foundation skills, and for digital natives this is their norm. In this paper we address this issue by describing the development of a gamified approach to learning, aimed at reinforcing and developing the fundamental knowledge of basic elements, whilst enhancing more conceptual skills, such as pattern recognition and hyper search strategies. These latter are increasingly important in the digital world. We focus here on numeracy skills, illustrating both how rote learning is practiced "incidentally" as strategic pattern recognition is developed in a game context. We detail how the application can be used diagnostically and normatively as it is mapped to outcome based educational levels and standards. We then discuss the extension of the approach to language development, and show implications for educational information systems design.