LocoRoco rolls into education

A school in Japan’s Chiba prefecture has played host to a unique method of teaching children maths, reports Famitsu.

In a collaboration with Sony Computer Entertainment, the non-profit organisation ACE – the Association of Corporate and Education – has formulated a way of teaching multiplication and division of fractions to children using the LocoRoco characters to explain difficult concepts.

The aim of the session was not to teach the actual method of, say, dividing fractions – the students involved had already been taught that the way to do so was by inverting the numerator and denominator of one of the fractions – but was to explain the method logically so that students would understand why the method works.

The presentation was based around a Flash game that featured the LocoRoco characters following a story that saw the concepts being explained, with additional worksheets giving the students practice.

The teachers at the school were impressed, noting that students didn’t get bored because of the story and that the pupils were more engaged through the usage of game characters.

"There are things that are difficult to teach in normal classes, but I think that they can be explained well by using the charm that games have," said Daisuke Fujikawa, board chairman of ACE.

"We think of today as being the starting point of our activities, which we hope to expand this much further in the future."