Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Number Addict

I have an addictive personality, so why would I even start a game called this?

Number Addict is a free iOS or Android game. (Also has a Facebook page. The sequel is a 99¢ app.[App store link]) It's a Tetrisish puzzle, where you are trying to amass groups of equal numbers to score them. Two nice wrinkles: it takes a group of at least as many as the number to score them, and you can combine adjacent numbers by addition up to the max number tile available. (Which increases as you level up.) You can see upcoming tiles, so this and the adding makes for many strategic decisions. I think it's good for reasoning as well as mental compositon of whole numbers.

The scoring is completely non-obvious. Scores increase both for number scored and how many in a group. This post is really just about sharing my data for a possible lesson.

In an effort to continue to seek the most boring possible video, here is a screen capture of me playing the game. I used screenr.com and the Air Server app to make the video. 


(It has a fun song 'Pocket Calculator' that I muted for the video. Most Boring Ever.)

But, I spent some time (too much) gathering screen caps of scores... (google pdf)



So I've even collected the data for Act 2... (google doc)


That's editable if you gather more data...

Some questions are obvious. What are the missing data points? What will the level 9 scores be like? (I've never gotten there!) What's the pattern to the increase in scores? Is it determinable or were the programmers just having fun?

If you give it a try, share what you find in the comments!

EDIT: collected a bit more data... great patterns. If you want it to verify student work, here's the spreadsheet, and here's the evidence.

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