Overview
OЯTHO is a two-player game installed in Warsaw, Poland, at the Copernicus Science Center (CNK). Dor Abrahamson designed the game, but then EDRL’s CNK collaborators, Katarzyna Potęga vel Żabik and Ilona Iłowiecka-Tańska, did the heavy lifting of making it happen, with our tech-wizard Herman Badowski of Unique Interactive bringing it to life on a large digital tabletop (think “multitouch tablet the size of your dining table”).
OЯTHO is, if you will, a cross between Etch-a-Sketch and mini-golf. You need to navigate the white ball along the yellow track — if you go off track it’s ‘game over’ for you. But here’s the thing — you can’t move the ball itself, it just doesn’t respond to that. Instead, one player can move the ball only parallel to one axis, and the other person around the corner can move the ball only parallel to the other, orthogonal axis. So, moving the ball is distributed between two players. This means that, to move the ball along the track, the two players need to collaborate. All this was Level 1. Then in Levels 2 and 3, players’ input gradually gravitates toward more and more mathematical articulations of (x, y) ordered pairs.
A general conjecture of this project is that the game creates opportunities for players to develop what we are calling “Cartesian perception,” and we believe that doing so depends, in part, on the discourse (practice, language) that the players’ generate spontaneously as their instrumental means of coordinating the enactment of their joint action. That is, players use words, prosody, vocalization, gesture, rhythm, etc. to steer each other’s perception, action, engagement — to show each other what to do, where do do it, how to do it, and when to do it.
Since its inauguration in March 2023 in CNK’s LivingLab, the game has already been played hundreds of thousands of times, and we have action logs of every move that they made. This lets us apply big-data quantitative analytics in an attempt to characterize aspects of interaction, such as the evolution of players’ cooperation strategies, or relations between dyad demographic composition (e.g., two teen-age friends, a mother and son, two dudes on a date) and collaboration quality. But we’re also finding relations between action metrics in Level 1 and mathematical behaviors in Level 3. Which is a good thing. And we’re looking at qualitative data, too — audio, video, and eye-tracking — to build a hopefully coherent story of how a struggle to coordinate action results in new mathematical skill. It’s useful to know all this, because then we can draw out principles for designing more games like OЯTHO.
Click here to view the the Berkeley School of Education project page.
Publications
Dimmel, J., Abrahamson, D., & Patterson, M. (2025, 2025/09/08). TriO: A multiplayer, immersive, virtual environment for exploring R3. Digital Experiences in Mathematics Education <Snapshot>. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40751-025-00182-z
Potęga vel Żabik, K., Iłowiecka-Tańska, I., & Abrahamson, D. (2024). It takes two to OЯTHO: A tabletop action-based embodied design for the Cartesian system <Snapshot>. Digital Experiences in Mathematics Education, 10(2), 189-201. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40751-024-00139-8