MathBharata: A Serious Game for Motivating Disabled Students to Study Mathematics

Game addiction is a serious issue. A lot of children play games too much that it hinders their academic prowess. This further makes hard subjects like mathematics to be more difficult for the student. This paper proposes a method to motivate students to study mathematics using a serious game to utilize that gaming addiction to help students instead. Serious game is a game which conveys serious content. MathBharata is a serious quiz game where players can try to answer multiple choice questions with incrementing difficulty. It uses various aspects to entice students to learn mathematics. MathBharata was tested on 85 students of both regular and disabled school. Every student who tested the MathBharata game, including both disabled students and regular students, responded that playing the game boosted their motivation to study more to beat the game, with 29.4% of students responding with "Strongly Agree" and 70.6% students responding with "Agree".