Pedro Tamburro is a product designer & design engineer crafting digital products end to end.
●Rio de Janeiro, BR
●Your time
Pedro Tamburro is a product designer & design engineer crafting digital products end to end.
Space mission where math operations fuel a rocket and unlock planets across the solar system.
Overview
A rocket needs to travel between planets, and to advance the child solves math operations that fuel the ship. Each planet represents a difficulty level: Mercury for simple sums, Saturn for multiplication. Consecutive correct answers activate a visual turbo boost. Targets arithmetic, quick reasoning, and introduces the solar system.
Details
In motion
Brazil ranks 65th of 81 countries in PISA mathematics, and repetitive, context-free exercises build aversion before a child understands what they are learning.
Game Designer & AI Engineer, solo: mechanics, procedural generation of the operations and code.
A game live in one day, with eight planets of rising difficulty and a turbo mode on three answers in a row that rewards with visual feedback instead of a point multiplier.
Brazil ranks 65th in the PISA mathematics ranking among 81 countries, with only 2% of students reaching advanced levels. The root isn't cognitive capacity, it's how math is presented. Repetitive, context-free exercises create aversion before the child even understands what they're learning. Research in gamified learning (Gee, 2003; Mayer, 2019) shows children retain more when challenges are embedded in narrative and have real in-game consequences. OrbiNum's hypothesis: if each math operation has an immediate visual consequence (the rocket advances or not), arithmetic stops being abstract and becomes instrumental.
A rocket travels between solar system planets, each representing a progressively harder difficulty level: Mercury (simple addition) to Saturn (multiplication and division). To move between planets, the child solves operations that 'fuel' the ship: the metaphor makes the consequence of a correct answer tangible. Three consecutive correct answers activate Turbo mode, a visual feedback that rewards consistency without creating external reward dependency. A life system (3 hearts) adds healthy tension without excessive punishment. At the end of each mission, performance is scored with stars.
OrbiNum was built in 1 day with Claude as pair programmer. Math operation generation is procedural and adapted to the current planet level, ensuring difficulty rises gradually without sudden jumps. The Turbo system was the most iterated artifact: early versions used score multipliers, but informal tests showed that the visual feedback (rocket animation) was more motivating than numbers. The space metaphor was chosen for two reasons: it is culturally neutral (works for all children) and introduces the solar system as parallel content without being didactic.
The key learning was about the role of metaphor in children's learning. A math operation on its own is neutral; a rocket that needs fuel makes the correct answer urgent and real. The biggest discovery during development: the Turbo mode didn't need material rewards, just intense audiovisual feedback. Children respond to the intensity of feedback, not the value of the reward. This suggests many gamification systems err by focusing on points and coins when what motivates is the sensation of power and speed.
