Designing a Game-Based Learning Environment to Foster Geometric Thinking

While there has been a steady rise in enrolment in secondary schools in recent years, many of the issues and concerns related to the quality of mathematics education have persisted. The challenges cut across several dimensions - access to resources, a gap between the intended and the implemented curriculum, and pedagogical practices that promote rote rather than reason, are a few important ones. These result in considerable learning gaps and limited opportunities for students to actively engage with the subject. In this paper, we describe the specific challenges of teaching geometry to high school students in India (as part of a project spanning four states), and argue that a carefully designed game-based learning environment, working in tandem with focused classroom discussions, could address some of the key challenges. We describe the design of our game-based learning environment and present the results of preliminary investigations that demonstrate its potential.