Collaborative Learning in the Caribbean: Onboarding the Math Pirates

This paper, by Peter Mozelius of Mid Sweden University, Tim Kreuzberg, Jimmy Jaldemark and Rasmus Pechuel, was published in 2026 in the Proceedings of the 20th European Conference on Games Based Learning. The paper notes that at the same time as research studies report on excessive gaming in online communities, general mathematical skills are decreasing. The authors cite the PISA assessments, which showed a clear drop in math performance in 2022 compared with 2018, with a large number of students in OECD countries classified as low performers. Building on the motivational effects of collaborative gaming, the paper presents a design and development concept for a multiplayer math game set in a pirate world. The study uses a design science research approach, covering the first two phases of a project: a literature review with author discussions, followed by an educational game analysis and discussions with professional game developers to define requirements.

In the proposed design, players are members of a pirate crew who carry out calculations to solve concrete problems in a virtual 3D pirate world on mobile devices. Crews sail with their own ship with the objective of winning pirate battles as a team, with each player handling a specific role such as navigator, cannon operator or sail controller. The game environment is either preset by a central hosting server or configured by teachers, who can create internal lobbies called pirate leagues and set rules, roles and mathematical topics based on task presets.