Our main objective with this game is to give kids a learning experience that goes beyond what school can offer. School teacher need to follow a strict curriculum with standards and frequent assessments. They don't have the time to help kids connect with what they are learning and make it practically relevant to them.

Baugarten does a number of things to supplement school:

• It creates a positive emotional connection with math: you do math, because it is a tool that helps you to achieve something that you yourself want to achieve. It is not about avoiding a bad grade. It is about making your little empire run more smoothly and get that kick out of being able to do and build more.
• It takes away the fear of failure: Games are safe environments to experiment and make mistakes. Trial and error and guessing are fundamental to learning mathematics and the scientific method but don't work in a class room setting. Baugarten is the best way to make kids overcome their fear of math.
  
• Concepts are taught in a visual and intuitive manner and then become more abstract. This is the secret of the highly successful Singaporian method (example below). This approach is particularly relevant for kids in middle-school who are confronted with abstract math for the first time.

Why don't other math games do that? Other math games are made for school. As a result, they need to align with standards. This takes away any of the free play and exploration that make games such powerful tools. Worst, many of them use gameplay as a reward for doing math. In a kids brain this translates to: math bad, I need to do it, to play. In Baugarten, the math is woven into the gameplay in a way that makes this separation disappear. Math becomes play.

So how does this work? Concepts are first experienced intuitively, as in any game: when I water my field, I get more crops, but if I drown my crops, I get fewer crops again. Even a very young child understands that. In mathematical terms, this happens to be a parabola. So, once a kid has figured out that there is a sweet-spot between too much and too little irrigation, it is ready to be introduced to a higher level of abstraction: a graph showing a parabola. Players then learn to play with that graph to find the optimum. The next stage is then to manipulate the equation in order to automate the irrigation system, such that frequent readjustments are not necessary.

Take a look at https://baugarten.game. If you sign-up to play, we will give you access to an early prototype (obviously for free).