Creature Capture

Creature Capture is a fractions based card-game that teaches fractions to elementary school children. While focused primarily on 3rd to 5th graders and expanding their understanding of fractions, Creature Capture is useful both for younger students as an on-boarding experience to fractions as well as for older students as a fun and engaging form of remediation. You can play Creature Capture at http://play.centerforgamescience.org/creaturecapture/.

Player's turn to place a card
Updating the score before the battle begins 
Thinking about this Water Battle

Battle Types

Creature Capture features 3 different battle types.

1. Fire Battles – Largest number wins
2. Water Battles – Smallest number wins
3. Grass Battles – Number closest to 1/2 wins

Hinting at Fire Battle rules
Hinting at Water Battle rules
Hinting at Grass Battle rules

Animated Battles

Creature Capture also features animated battles that explain the math behind which card wins the battle. Fractions are displayed during these animations as either Numberlines or Pie Charts and can animate in 5 different animations.

1. Which is greater
2. Which is smaller
3. Which is closer to 1/2
4. Addition
5. Multiplication.

These animations became a stand-alone teacher tool known as the Fractionizer.

Animating Fire Battle with Numberlines
Water Battle with two Multiplications
Comparing cards in a Grass Battle using Numberlines
 Comparing cards in a Fire Battle using Pie Charts

My Contributions

As the Lead for Creature Capture I bounced around nearly every aspect of the game. However, the core of my time was spent on gameplay design, UI/UX design, level design, system design, front-end implementation, and data analysis.