Pythagoria

This game is a geometry exercise handout, except in the form of a video game. As someone who's always had a knack for math, this is a very interesting idea as I can see many ways in which an interactive tool can help make geometry exercises more interesting and intuitive. Tools like GeoGebra can be used to great effect to visualize concepts where being able to tweak values can help you understand the material much better than just a static printout. A game could have the ability to generate an infinite set of problems about a specific concept, with a configurable difficulty, giving you however many problems you need to understand whatever you're trying to learn.

Unfortunately, Pythagoria does none of that. Instead, it simply an exercise printout but in digital form.

Even more unfortunately, it's simply worse than a printout.

First of all, the game doesn't really make any effort to teach you the relations that you need to know to solve the exercises. There's a small help section that explains how to calculate the area of a rectangle and the Pythagorean theorem, but there are many geometric principles that you simply have to know. Not a problem if you already know these principles but certainly not good enough for teaching.

Secondly, I didn't find the actual exercises all that interesting most of the time. This could simply be a case of me not being the target audience (but if the target audience is people with less math knowledge, the game never really teaching you becomes a problem). The main problem here is simply that there's not all that much variation to the exercises. It's a lot of the same exercise but with slightly different numbers / configurations. On a printout, this wouldn't be an issue since you can just skip exercises where you already feel confident you know how to do them (and there being many exercises on the same concept is helpful to those who need them or for the more difficult concept that requires more practice before you feel confident in it). Pythagoria on the other hand does not allow you to skip levels. ... Well, you can just guess the answer until you get it right, which I'm not sure how I feel about.

The third problem, and, to me, by far the largest one is the note taking system. Taking notes is an important part of these exercises as there's usually too many numbers to keep in your head at the same time. (Or maybe I'm just dumb.) However, the note taking system is absolute garbage and a real pain to use. First of all, the way that you draw is by placing dots every frame. This means you have to move your mouse very slowly and methodically for the writing to be legible. This is frustrating as you have to go much slower than you're able to think. The second problem is that there is no way of erasing mistakes. The only thing you can do is press a button that clears the entire screen, erasing all the relevant and correct notes that you want to keep as well.

A bad note taking system may seem like a nitpick, but it's the primary way in which you interact with the game and it is torture to use. I would recommend not bothering with it and simply copying down the exercises to pen and paper instead. Except the exercises aren't usually complicated or interesting enough to justify spending the time to do that. I used the note taking system, reluctantly.

In the end, this game does not take advantage of the move to a digital format at all. Instead, it only introduces new problems. Instead of playing this game, I would recommend finding a geometry exercise PDF and printing it. There's plenty of free, printable math exercises available online. If you don't have a printer, use the note taking features in Adobe Reader instead.

Quite simply a set of geometry problems where you are supposed to figure out the length of a side or the area of a square or whatever based on the information given: if you liked doing the math homework in school, you'll find entertainment here; if not, this won't change your opinion.

For those of us in the target group, most of the problems are pleasant, not too trivial but solvable with minimum of notes, though there were couple of harder nuts too (the dreaded 3.8). There is a note-making system in the game but it is not very good.

A divisive factor is the way the geometry drawings are made unintuitive: the sizes and shapes are not necessarily on scale with each other, and just because some square looks the same size as the other doesn't mean that they are (or that either is a square unless specifically stated or proved).
This can be a bit confusing, but I know my junior high teacher would have liked that very much, it was a point he made often, to not rely on how things look like but what the facts given state. I also approve.

There's probably no penalty given at excessive guessing (though I'd suspect people who like this sort of game wouldn't want to guess) and sixty problems which I cleared in an hour and a half, so it's by no means a big game. And I admit I kinda wish it had been bigger.