This is the wrong sort of of 'gamification'. The part of gamification that works is dripping out little bursts of serotonin based on intermittent reward schedu

This is the wrong sort of of 'gamification'. The part of gamification that works is dripping out little bursts of serotonin based on intermittent reward schedules. Farmville has proved you could addict people to successful algebra manipulation, but it won't be in an interface like this, in fact, there isn't a need for the cute dragons and fairies and stuff at all -- just levels, achievements, cool rare rewards, sound and a little bling all around doing the algebra problem correctly. One thing I think the scratch demo does get right is the per-step nature of solving these problems. I would imagine that you'd have a directed graph of possible intermediate steps for solving and reward along the way for a harder problem if you were serious about teaching algebra this way.