Inspired by Super Mario and Farmville, this founder thinks games can help kids learn math

Mathematics is a subject that kids either find very engaging, or downright boring. For the latter group, having to sit down and study the subject can be worse than going to the dentist – an ordeal that Mustafa Saeed can attest to.

“I had struggled in my early school education, not because I did not like it. Rather, it just could not engage me enough to keep me interested,” Saeed, who hails from Pakistan, recalls. There was an instance when his parents tried using a number of “tricks” to make him learn how to count. Instead, Saeed ended up learning how to do so by playing Nintendo’s hit game [series], Super Mario, when he had to “collect those coins from zero to 100, and repeat the process.”

This wasn’t the only instance where Saeed found his learning being accelerated through playing games. “Similarly, Farmville taught me that rice requires extra amount of water to grow, and Angry Birds taught me how physics works,” he adds.

These incidents came back to him when he was giving a seven-year-old kid math tuition during his junior year in university:

It seemed like an easy job, but the experience changed my perspective of learning and education. Keeping that child engaged and focused was an effort in itself. We as students have always experienced that the existing curriculum presentations are highly unattractive and lackluster, especially for young children.

To keep his attention, Saeed decided to gamify his lessons, and was surprised to find that it helped a lot in helping his student learn and understand the concepts at hand.

“During this time, I actually developed a lot of interest in how games and certain dynamics, when incorporated, can actually influence behaviors in learning,” he says. “Awards in the form of badges triggered a sense of competition and achievement in Hadi [his student], and as a result, better output.”

These experiences inspired Saeed to create 3Restart, a company focused on creating predictive and adaptive learning solutions in the form of games. According to him, the software behind the games “can measure and generate analytics to measure learning patterns and an improved learning experience,” while simultaneously utilizing game dynamics to make the learning content interesting and engaging.

He terms it as a “learning positioning system” that puts learning priorities on track, while keeping the content engaging and fun yet as natural as possible.

Saeed claims that the product can “successfully predict what a student is most likely to forget at a specific time, and works mainly on enhancing knowledge retention amongst kids […] it can predict what knowledge needs to be reviewed now in order to efficiently balance that particular knowledge group which is most required to be learnt.”

Skipping local, going global

Currently, the product is still in the pilot phase, and the team is testing features with students and teachers from local schools, making sure to pick testers from different backgrounds and income brackets. Their target, Saeed reveals, isn’t just to help students in Pakistan, but those from all over the world. Toward this end, they are launching it on the respective app stores to reach an international audience.