I remember playing Prodigy as a kid (along with whatever "I guaranty this'll be fun" video game adjacent math exercise my teacher/parent wanted me to do), and knowing what I know now about game design (the most rudimentary principles), I'm starting to see a massive gaping problem in that a lot of the educational games I played, especially about math, were like, embarassed they had to include math?
I mean, I know these games are not made by, like, the worlds best game designers or anything, I know they're low effort, but it was always like "Math is fun! Why is math fun? Uhhhbuhuhuh Dinosaurs. With laser guns." Like, no, Dinosaurs with Laser Guns are fun. That's not related to math. You have to prove MATH is fun, it's self evident that Dinosaurs with Laser Guns are fun.
Taking a look at Prodigy specifically, it's base form was as a monster-taming rpg. How was math integrated? Well, whenever you tried to do something, the game yoinked you into a stylistically different (bland) interface and forced you to do multiplication, blooket style. Except blooket is doing this as a review tool, the game is just a way to force you to do review, whereas Prodigy was pitched to me as a seven year-old as a way to make math fun.
NOOOoooo. That's not how you do that. Just because I'm seven doesn't mean I can't intuit when someone's trying to pull correlation-without-causation, especially because I'd seen the proverbial Dinosaurs with Laser Guns shtick without the Math dragging it down and it was so much cooler.
At the bare minimum, math interfaces in these games should be crunchier. Like, imagine if your calculator, instead of just handing you the number, briefly flashed through the entire calculation process with a mechanical ticking sound and then used typewriter spines to click out the answer. What if, for each place value you got correct with your answer, the number locked itself in steel with a "csmash" sound? Hell, what if their were little animations for calculating operations, where the operand sign did a little flip and then smushed the numbers together with a little "Brrding!" And that's without designing the problems themselves to be satisfying or interesting, or finding ways to integrate the core math operation micro into a macro game structure like some insane math roguelike or math strategy game, or even without overhauling the UI architecture to make the system more usable. Like, typing games do this better by a significant margin, learn from the typing games!
Why am I making this post? Well, when 7 year old me was beginning to get bored of the "Dinosaur Laser Gun" shtick and starting to see the intrusive math architecture underlying it all, I asked, "Why don't I like this?" and concluded that educational games were just bad. Now that I'm older, I know math can be fun in the right circumstances, and now I know that educational games are bad - but they don't have to be! There's a situation vacant!