Baugarten

"Why do I need to learn this?" is the question many math teachers hear before a kid disengages from math. Typically this happens when math gets abstract around 6th grade (depending on curriculum). 

This affects disproportionately groups with few STEM graduates as role models. If members of your family, community, or social circle have STEM degrees, this question does not arise as easily in your mind. 

This contributes to the fact that in the OECD over 50% of college students are women, but they represent only 30% of STEM graduates. Underrepresented minorities represent 39% of the U.S. population but make up only 24% of the STEM workforce and the US performs better than other countries. 

A global decline in math education outcomes, accelerated by COVID, will not facilitate an increase in STEM graduates from underserved communities. It will affect the lifelong earnings of struggling students and hit poor countries the hardest. 

The latest PISA study of educational achievements across OECD countries showed that math scores are at the lowest level ever tested and declined faster than other subjects. This comes at great cost to individuals and entire economies. In the US, all of the 20 highest-earning majors are STEM. Economists estimate that such a significant math gap will mean diminished lifetime earnings for this generation (The Economist Dec. 6, 2023). 

An average decline in math performance hits struggling students the hardest. The difference between a slightly better or worse grade for good students, affects their earnings minimally. But for someone who just about failed to graduate, their income will decline on average by 50% compared to degree-holders in OECD countries. Again, this also holds true for less developed countries. 

Poorer countries were similarly affected by school closures but have less budget to remedy the situation. The US added one quarter of its annual budget to help schools catch up, poor countries don't have that fiscal power. 

Except for very few countries that have come out with stronger math skills from the pandemic (Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, South Korea), there is an entire generation of kids that has to cope with a period of inadequate math education. And at least for the OECD countries, the trend in math was negative before COVID, so something more fundamental is broken in the way we teach math today. 

Is our way of teaching math still reaching all of our children? 

https://vimeo.com/938211930?share=copyhttps://vimeo.com/938211930?sh...We develop a math learning game that is very different from existing solutions. Our game is focused on emotions. 

Baugarten is the world-building game for STEM. While playing, you discover that math & science formulas are tools that help you manage your resources, manage your economy, and build farms, houses, zeppelins, steamships, and windmills. Baugarten creates an emotional connection for the player to discover for themselves that STEM methods are tools. 

As any teacher will tell you, developing students’ desire to learn is a crucial step in the learning process. Academics call this Utility value. It simply means that students need to understand the use of an academic topic as a tool to help with their own goals. Studies indicate that this utility-value leads to interest and achievement. 

Baugarten creates interest. We weave math into a world-building game. A genre that includes blockbusters like Sid Meier’s Civilization or Sim City. In Baugarten, you build your own empire in a steampunk world full of nature far in the future. Like other games of the genre, Baugarten does not require using math /science. 

Applying STEM formulas will, however, get you ahead faster, making you experience their utility. Building on the ideas of Nir Eyal, author of Hooked, we design incentives within the game whereby the player, while autonomous, has an incentive to pick up math/science formulas as tools to build.

Unlike existing math games, our goal is not to teach a curriculum. Our objective is emotional and motivational: give players a meaningful, visual and autonomous engagement with math & science, whereby they discover for themselves the power of STEM. 

A big part of our philosophy, inspired by the educator Georg Polya, is guessing. Take the farm in Baugarten. You don’t need to calculate the exact number of seeds to plant your field. You can always guess, but the resulting inefficiencies will be highly visual and pile up. 

To make our game, we leverage to the fullest, what modern games technology has on offer as well as using best-practice in terms of ways of working when developing technology, e.g. rapid iteration prototyping and play-testing. It is our believe that kids deserve a learning game that has the feel of a real video game and not something based on old technology with a curriculum shoed into it. 

The video below provides more extensive gameplay footage than our shortened pitch video: https://vimeo.com/938211930?share=copy

Our core demography is pre-teens and teenagers who learn Algebra and Geometry and ask themselves: “Why do I need to learn these abstractions?” Many disconnect as a result. In Baugarten, they experience "the why". 

Baugarten has the ambition to change how a player feels about math and science. For some kids, sitting in a class with a teacher writing equations on a blackboard does the trick. For most, it does not. And as data suggests, less and less so. 

We know that culturally relevant pedagogies work as a method - e.g. if a kid grows up on a farm, using math exercises that are relevant to farming lead to better math outcomes. Pre-teens and teenagers play a lot of video games (2.6h/day on average in the US). And they love building and crafting in these games, as the success of Minecraft and City-builders illustrates. Building and crafting can be meaningfully connected to STEM. If a child goes to see their parents, a teacher, or another pupil to ask for advice on how to solve a math problem to optimise a production in Baugarten - we have achieved our goal of self-motivating a child to seek STEM knowledge.

By self-motivating kids, to seek out STEM knowledge, we fundamentally change how they see themselves. Something particularly important in a context where a player demography may lack STEM role models. 

We aim to make Baugarten highly inclusive

Our game design allows for multiple pathways to success, where the use of STEM is a powerful tool but not a strict requirement. This approach caters to different initial levels of interest in STEM, making the game inclusive for a heterogeneously skilled audience.

Our editor, which allows educators to link their own math /science formulas to custom buildings and units, makes our tool adaptable to special learner populations and highly ‘moddable.’ 

Children disengaged from school due to poor performance particularly benefit from utility-value interventions that show them why they learn. 

We also expect great results with kids with ADHD who typically engage very well with games. ADHD being under-diagnosed in minority communities, a solution for this group, without explicit focus on them, is particularly powerful.

And we know that our target communities are searching for solutions. Google searches for the term "math game" are at a tremendous 2 million per month (in English alone). The results are predominantly quizzes that force repetitive calculations but do not self-motivate kids to learn STEM. 

We are all gamers, who have all experienced how having or not having STEM skills can open or close doors. Some of us have learned the hard way that it is advantageous to be excited by STEM early in life. 

Henry van Wagenberg, a co-founder of Baugarten, struggled with math in high-school. He is the poster-child for a kid that did not see the point in math and science and therefore did not invest any effort into it, while still being otherwise a dedicated student. Later in life, when he taught himself how to code, he taught himself math and science - when he saw the point in it. 

Similarly, Sam did not see the point of math and science until later in life. Getting an MSC in Computer Science after having been enrolled in an MA in Philosophy. 

Our game-artist Amelia did not enjoy math in school. She had to take a year twice because she failed math. Being only 22 years old, that memory is fresh and she keeps on telling us how much our game would have helped her. 

The exceptions in this regard are Owen and Alex. Alex's grand-parents came as refugees to Germany and his father's good grades in math allowed him to earn a university degree, he would not have had access to otherwise. His dad then dedicated his career to teaching math in high-school. Alex took over the baton earning his first money tutoring younger kids from his school in math. 

Similarly, Owen's dad is a university professor in a STEM field. Gifted at math, Owen studied physics and tutored students in maths.  Both Alex and Owen know first hand, that it is primarily a question of being motivated and knowing why you need to learn something. When you know why you learn something, the rest will fall into place. 

There is only one way to make a good video game: test and iterate. And this is what we are doing with as diverse a community of players as possible. As it stands, we have tests lined up with schools in rural and city environments in the US and Europe, schools with a science and without a science focus. Additionally, we will be testing our game with indigenous Americans together with Rose Bigheart O'Leary, a PhD. Student in Informatics at UCI. 

Alex, who worked six years in economic development in Africa, is looking for partners to test our game with communties in poorer countries as well. 

We have a prototype that we have started testing with a diverse set of players. After each test we improve the game. We have concluded 5 of such cycles. In total, there have been ca. 40 play-testers. 

We expect from our application two major benefits: an immediate benefit in terms of product development and a medium term (but no less important) benefit regarding dissemination/distribution. 

The immediate benefit that your diverse network provides is access to a diverse set of play-testers for our prototype. The secret to making a good game is testing and iterating it. If you want to make a game that appeals to a wide and inclusive demographic, you need to ensure that your play-testers stem from a diverse group. Our team has a strong back-ground in game-making and building start-ups but we are not strongly networked in the education community yet. With your help, we expect to  expand our network and find partners at a global scale, who would be interested in having their diverse students play our game. 

As our product gets close to a release, we need to have distribution channels ready. A lot of EdTech tools never get widely used because distribution is an afterthought. Although we only have a prototype, we are already signing partnership agreements with EdTech companies in our limited network, to help us eventually distribute our game. We would love to leverage the platform you provide, to build these distribution partnerships globally with many more education providers. 

Auxiliary benefits would include: 

• access to leadership coaching: we have a strong set of advisors, including Sid Meier, one of the godfathers of video games, but we are very keen to hear from experts in distribution, marketing, product-market fit and design
• in monitoring and evaluation, we also have great existing partnerships, including David Gagnon's field day lab and we are teaming up with Shari Metcalf from Harvard to conduct efficacy studies. We still expect you to provide us with deep expertise and guidance in this regard 

Our solution is different from most current math games in that we build a tool to allow kids to emotionally connect with STEM formulas at home. 

In building our product, we start with the game, not the curriculum. We build a base-building game that is unambiguously fun. Then we see, how we can weave math into it in a way that is: 

• meaningful: productions (your fishery, your sawmill, farm, mine etc.) generate data that informs an optimal production setting. The data can be presented in many different ways (the size of a field, a linear non-linear equation, a productivity chart). The data is what you would need in the real world, to solve the same problem. 
• visual: data is as much as possible "in game" (vs. in menus) and we try to avoid text. We also try to keep the graphics at a high standard to immerse the player and 
• a choice: Baugarten is not a series of quizzes that you need to solve to get ahead in the game. Baugarten naturally provides data that can be used to tweak settings that increase the performance of the player's empire. But the user can always just guess. 

Guessing is fundamental to the scientific discovery and in particular mathematics (cf. George Polya). Forming a hypothesis is the first step of the scientific process. Sadly, schools are not equipped to teach this iterative approach. 

This is why we make our game for home use. Baugarten is to be played at home, so a child experiences the power of math and science formulas firsthand. When in school, the child will know why to learn math and is immeasurably more likely to succeed. 

In the words of Keith Devlin (Director, Stanford University Human-Sciences & Technologies Institute and the “NPR Math Guy”):

“The only way to acquire mathematical thinking ability is by a process of exploration – lots of trial-and-error and reflection. 

This is exactly what video games can deliver.”

But virtually all math games are quizzes. They don't actually allow for this sort of exploration. Baugarten does. 

We garner short-term interest in STEM to affect long-term outcomes

In theory of change terms, we would expect teenagers from ca. 12 years old from communities with few STEM graduates as role models (we expect our game to be used beyond these communities, but this is where we expect the greatest impact) :

• to play our game in an informal learning context (input);
• be faced with a decision space with culturally relevant and visual cues to use math as an optional tool to get ahead faster (activities) (Boaler, Chen, Williams, & Cordero, 2016);
• experience an enjoyable experience triggering situational interest confirmed by players self-motivating to use math (output) (Hulleman et al., 2010);
• Associate positive feelings of personal growth with their success : “self-efficacy” (outcome) (Hung, Huang, & Hwang, 2014);
• Affecting their dispositional interest in math in the long run and possibly changing their math identity and growth mindset eventually opting for a STEM degree /career (impact).

There is some evidence that the project-based approach Baugarten offers can have lifelong positive effects (Boaler & Selling, 2017).

Beyond this academic framework, we have conducted dozens of stakeholder interviews including parents, teachers and students. These have confirmed that for most parents math and science is really the pain point - whether their kid is in school, and even worse, if they home-school. 

Teachers tell us unprompted that the moment they hear "why do I need to learn this?", they have pretty much lost that child. 

From adult gamers, we hear a lot: "I wish that would have been around when I was in high school". 

In general, when we ask parents who do not have a STEM background about how they remember math class, we do not frequently see a positive emotional connection with the subject (to put it mildly). And many are still haunted by the mention of the name of their high-school math teacher. 

Learning math should not feel that way. 

Generating and using data to ensure impact is central to our project. Games are built around generating unique experiences for players, to make them unique, you need to track user behaviour (more on how we protect user anonymity below). 

As per our theory of change, the impact we are eventually aiming for is that a child who would otherwise have not seen themselves as someone interested or able to go into a STEM career, will do so, can only be tracked over the long term. 

However, in the near term, we can approximate through gathering data relevant to the intermediate steps of the theory of change. For instance, we will generate data on:

• are we engineering situations that get most of our player to self-motivate to use math and science? 
• do players increase the frequency of using math and science over time

We can conduct occasional surveys that ask players about their interest in STEM. 

To do so, we are cooperating with external evaluators. For instance, we are building a pipeline to integrate with Open Game Data (a project from the university of Wisconsin, giving researchers access to learning game data). We will already do so during the prototype phase. 

All data gathered will be anonymised in accordance with GDPR (Europe-based). We will keep some contextual data on players (e.g. age /grade) to improve the use of our dataset for researchers. For this, we deploy system anonymised identity: players are represented by persistent, anonymized UUIDs to track their performance across multiple play sessions without keeping username, email, phone number etc. Data gathered will not be commercialized.

Our game leverages Unity, a versatile game development platform, to create an engaging learning environment. Unity's robust framework supports the integration of complex math and science formulas into gameplay mechanics, allowing us to engineer dynamic decision-making processes. 

Additionally, Unity's scalability ensures our game can be easily updated and expanded: both in terms of depth of the game and across multiple platforms. 

In our game design, we are guided by learning science as outlined in our theory of change. Notably research on utility value, self-efficacy, culturally relevant pedagogies and interest - both situational and dispositional. We integrate these into building our product by generating data relevant to all steps in our theory of change for which we can generate metrics.  

For instance, our game allows us to do embedded assessments of situational interest (fundamentally, how long and frequently a player plays) and self-efficacy (how much a player interacts with the math and its evolution over time). This allows us to refine our product and tailor experiences for each player. We know what gets a player to use math. We can engineer situations by tailoring rewards /loss aversion that trigger the use of math by players. 

From the limited playtests we have done so far with our prototype, we see that players, who do not have strong STEM backgrounds, typically try to get around using the math until they hit a first challenge that can be overcome more rapidly by the use of math and science. At this point, players, at a minimum, try to guess solutions. Which, according to George Polya, a mathematician and great contributor to mathematics education, is the first step in mathematical discovery. 

We employ 6 full time staff including four co-founders. 

Additionally, we are working with three part-time freelancers for marketing and sound. 

We are looking to add 4 more full time staff to the team in the coming months. 

The original idea is at least three years old. Work on building the team and raising capital started in September 2022. We incorporated in March 2023 and started early work on our product but advanced slowly until October 2023 due to limited funding. 
From October 2023 our current team was constituted and we have been advancing rapidly since. 

Our goal as an organisation is to develop a tool that makes STEM more accessible, in particular to currently disadvantaged communities. We can only achieve that with a diverse team that encompasses a vast array of social, cultural, and identity-based attributes. We are committed to fostering a culture where diversity, equity, and inclusion are the bedrock of our operations and strategic vision. This is why we actively recruit staff from a myriad of backgrounds. Our leadership team includes individuals of different ethnicities, gender identities, ages, and sexual orientations. At Baugarten, intersectionality is the norm. Few of our team members live in the country they were born in or work in their native language. 

Our management team has received trainings on topics such as unconscious bias, inclusive communication, and cultural competency in their prior careers. We are aware that as our organisation grows, we will have to institutionalise processes that ensure data-driven decisions, community engagement and feedback mechanisms for employees. 

Our users will be children from ca. 6th grade. Our customers are their parents and STEM teachers are our advocates. 

The search term "math games" is googled 2 million times a month. 

From customer interviews with parents, we know that for parents math education is often a pain-point. This is true both for parents whose kids are struggling (75% of Community College students fail Algebra) and those who wish to accelerate them (40% of US schools do not teach Physics or Calculus anymore). 

Further, parents are worried that their kids waste too much time on video games, where they don't learn anything (American teenagers play on average 2.4h of video games a day). 

From customer interviews with teachers, we know that "why do I need to learn this" is often the last thing they hear from a student before they disengage with math. We also know that parents turn to teachers to learn about good supplemental materials. This makes teachers our advocates. 

We give parents and teachers a tool that will show their children/students, why they learn math. 

Our game works as a monthly subscription. Similar to Minecraft, you can play Baugarten free for a limited time but the level will reboot. We start on the PC platform, as it lends itself to long-term immersive gameplay (vs. the more casual tablet or cell-phone). With Unity, we can relatively easily expand to other platforms later. 

Our game is for home use (if it was for school, it would need to be a lower quality browser game). We don't expect our game to be used widely in school as it is curriculum-free, but we expect teachers to be advocates, as it is a powerful way to get a disengaged student to understand why math is important. Especially, if they come from a community with few STEM role models. 

We estimate the price of the subscription to be $14/month, roughly what math quiz subscriptions for younger children and adults charge. This makes Baugarten much more accessible compared to the most common alternative: tutoring. 

We expect Baugarten to be a profitable endeavour with a strong social mission. We will charge customers for our services at market rates but will offer strong discounts in emerging markets and aim to do so for disadvantaged communities in developed markets. 

As it stands, we are financed from a mix of public grants and investor capital. We have received ca. $150,000 in investment from private investors from Europe, US and Asia. 

In Germany, we have been awarded two public grants. One Innovation grant of $70,000 and a creativity grant for $110,000. 

Game development is a lengthy iterative process. So, we expect that we will need to raise an additional $1.5M. We expect this to be financed primarily from private and philanthropic investors with additional funding from public grants in Germany. 

1,000 potential customers have signed up to playtest Baugarten. We look to have an Alpha version of the game developed by the end of 2025. We might be able to pre-release it at a discount to generate revenue. The final version is likely not for sale before mid 2026. If we do not pre-sell the Alpha in 2025, we will do an additional capital raise in late 2025.