Hiring: Learning Game Developer (iOS)

We’re Motion Math. We make learning games that let kids play with numbers. (Watch the 2-minute TV piece at http://bit.ly/abcmotionmath for a great overview.) If you want to help kids learn and you love making games, Motion Math is absolutely, positively the best team for you to join. Our team is exploring what’s newly possible with mobile, moving waaaaay beyond flashcards, and finding how to fuse learning and play. Our first five apps have won numerous awards, have all been featured by Apple, and have been downloaded over two million times.

We’re looking to add a founding game engineer to work on diverse parts of our iOS codebase: gameplay, game mechanics, controls, game state, graphics. Our team is heavy on the learning side of learning games (we were founded at the Stanford School of Education and see below for our efficacy study). We’re looking to add developers with experience building really fun games. We’re currently focused on conceptual casual math games for elementary and middle school students on iOS – we’ve made games about fractions, mental arithmetic, the number line, multiplication, and our next is about estimation. However, our ambitions are much larger, both in terms of the content we’ll cover, and the technical platforms we’ll explore.

Requirements

  • Experience developing really fun games (that we can play!)
  • Experience in Objective-C: frameworks, patterns, and optimization
  • Experience with rapid prototyping, and subsequent refactoring into solid, modular code
  • Startup scrappiness and energy (and references who will attest to these qualities)
  • Degree in Computer Science or related field from a top school

Bonus points

  • Experience with cocos2D, StackMob, or web games
  • Experience with modern development techniques (TDD, Scrum, pair programming, performance testing and tuning, etc.)
  • Experience building products for kids

More details:
You’ll be working full-time in our downtown San Francisco office, one block from Montgomery BART. Competitive pay, equity, health insurance, a professional development budget, and the opportunity of a lifetime. Qualified candidates should send an intro email and resume to careers@motionmathgames.com.

More about us:
Motion Math creates fun learning games that let kids play with numbers, the “gold standard for mobile learning games,” according to the President of Scholastic. Our first product, conceived at the Stanford School of Education, made fraction estimation fun and physical and won a Serious Play Gold Medal. A rigorous efficacy study (the first for an iPad educational app) found the game improved test scores 15% and attitudes towards fractions by 10% – watch a two-minute TV piece at bit.ly/abcmotionmath to learn more. Our four subsequent learning games have received rave reviews, promotion by Apple, #5 rankings in the Education category, and over 2,000,000 total downloads. We’re backed by a world-class group of angel investors, including Mitch Kapor, Dave McClure, and Mike Wood (the founder of LeapFrog), and we’ve been featured in TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Wired, WSJ, Forbes, PBS’s NewsHour, Time, and the NYT. Most importantly: kids, parents, and teachers love our products.