March 2025 Update: Co-creation with the Universities of Leicester (UK) and Aalborg (DK)

This month at Brain Man VR our pursuit of Pizza Maths excellence shifted gears as our collaborators from the University of Leicester Maths department submitted their recommendations for the next mini-game and our XR development partners at the University of Aalborg started making plans to implement them in the next version of our immersive learning experience.

Here at Brain Man VR we consider it extremely important to ensure that we are partnering with the best young minds. So we partnered with the mathematics department of the University of Leicester and the computer science department of the University of Aalborg to ensure that:

a) we’re targeting the right areas of the math’s syllabus i.e. those that are the hardest for learners to grasp, and

b) we’re working with talented VR developers to create each mini-game using the most creative and innovative approaches possible.

We sought mathematical expertise from the University of Leicester where Prof Alberto Paganini was kind enough to point some of his best students in our direction. A team of three (Daisy, Urvi and Eloise) highly engaged and extremely competent Mathematics’ graduates took on the challenge of dissecting the GCSE maths syllabus to outline which parts lend themself most naturally to the Pizza Maths VR environment with great enthusiasm. They then went on to assimilate evidence from several different exam boards’ annual reports which provide intelligence regarding where learners’ unmet needs were greatest from one year to the next. This approach culminated in a ranked list of maths topics that learners seem to be struggling with the most, which they further scrutinised according to the results of survey data from students in secondary schools across Leicestershire, as well as qualitative data from maths teachers. This enabled them to identify areas where exam boards, students and teachers agree are the most important areas of the syllabus for us to focus on and to recommend a variety of mini-games that we could add to Pizza Maths VR.

We were delighted with how they applied themselves and feel their final report is well worth the first class marks they so thoroughly deserve.

That they identified circle theorem as the optimal area to explore on the basis of these objective measures was fortuitous. It clearly lends itself very nicely to a Pizza Restaurant at the End of the Universe given that the menu consists entirely of round foodstuffs. And it doesn’t take a huge leap of faith to imagine that alien life forms might well have exacting standards for pizza slicing, requiring their pizzas to be segmented in a wider variety of sections than their human counterparts here on Earth. Hence, we anticipate that our steadily growing user base of teen testers will soon find themselves calculating angles to create pizza slices with very particular dimensions in the not too distant future. Although, that said, maybe not…

Upon evaluating the full range of mini-games that our University of Leicester team suggested when our University of Aalborg VR developers picked up the baton they surprised us by choosing to implement a mini-game that our maths experts dreamed up as part of their “stretch goals.” Given the pressing need for a circular economy that minimises waste while maximising profits on planet Earth in 2020’s and the strong likelihood that running a business in outer space might well also require raw materials to be used as efficiently as possible they were keen to create a mini-game that focused on creating two-dimensional (2D) templates for three-dimensional (3D) pizza boxes. This was inspired by their own research with teachers and pupils at a secondary school in Poland, echoing a sentiment that we heard right at the beginning of our interactions with Heads of Maths at top London schools: many students struggle to imagine the proportions of 3D shapes on the basis of 2D component parts.

After seeing the excellent work produced by our University of Leicester colleagues, we absolutely cannot wait to see the fruits of the University of Aalborg post-graduate team’s labours over the next few weeks. If you are a budding Virtual Reality developer and would also be willing to contribute to Pizza Maths in a voluntary capacity we would be delighted to hear from you;. www.brainmanvr.co.uk/contact-us