Design of games for mathematical learning

We claim that these issues can begin to be addressed through the development of design knowledge by participants in the design and development process. However, it would seem that the options to achieve this are very costly: create multi-party design and development teams, which will include experts in every related field or train 'superdesigners' who are well informed in all domains. Ideally, we would like to see mathematical games developed by organizations that encapsulate all these diverse strands of knowledge. Unfortunately, creating such an environment is outside the scope of expertise of most organisations.

Therefore, we propose what we believe to be a viable alternative tool: learning patterns. These patterns will be designed as an enabling tool for the open and distributed sharing of design knowledge. They will be a major output of this project and will be fully detailed in the final report. Learning Patterns are derived from the concept of Design patterns,  inaugurated by Christopher Alexander in the late 1970s, and since then widely adopted by the computer science community. They add an epistemic-pedagogical layer to that construct, to make it relevant for educational contexts.