Teenagers + Math + Coding = Innovation
What happens when a bunch of teenagers who love math get together to resurrect an extinct video game?
SineRider is a game about love and graphing, built by a global team of teenagers at Hack Club. Hack Club—supported by Endless— aims to inspire as many teenagers as possible to run and attend hackathons and creates powerful spaces for teenagers to learn, get motivated, make friends and collaborate on highly technical projects. To make hack clubs and hackathons more accessible to everyone, Hack Club has been rolling out grants for teenagers to start their own hackathons, promotional campaigns with FIRST Robotics and Girls Who Code, extensive and very detailed open-source documentation written by teenagers for other aspiring teen organizers, and a curated directory where teenagers can register and find hackathons near them.
Even though the original SineRider made a splash when it was released, it disappeared from the internet shortly after release when every major browser changed plugin structures, making SineRider unplayable. It quickly disappeared into the ether.
That is until a group of teenagers at Hack Club resurrected it. Basically, players use math equations to draw curves for a sled to maneuver through, often in a puzzle-like manner. SineRider is based on the fundamental premise that it’s fun to play with math and is inspired by the “near-universal impulse for geeky teenagers to mess around with graphing calculators.” Each puzzle has multiple solutions, yet they can be crafted based on specific mathematics concepts. This open-source project is maintained by youth of all kinds: artists, musicians, programmers, and storytellers.
Whereas math concepts are traditionally taught in a structured, linear fashion, the Hack Clubbers behind Sine Rider wanted to create a math learning tool that emphasized the fun, voluntary nature of games. Successful learning games like Minecraft have a “primary goal [of] play, and learning flows naturally from playing with a deeply-technical system.”
SineRider was designed with this in mind. Instead of building linear concepts attached to Common Core Standards, they “present a rich interactive world optimized for mathematical exploration and discovery through play. SineRider is built for joy, and from joy emerges learning.”
Play SineRider here and learn more about how to support them through Hack Club.