Game Over Gopher from Math Snacks: a coordinate plane game

Game Over Gopher is one of the Math Snacks games made by the New Mexico State University Learning Games Lab, with funding from the National Science Foundation. Math Snacks bundles games, interactive modules and short animations that give middle school students another way to look at math concepts, in particular those of grades six, seven and eight. The game won a gold medal in the Education category of the International Serious Play Awards in 2013, and it had been a finalist in the 2012 Serious Games Showcase & Challenge.

The design started with research. Team researchers analyzed standardized math test results from more than 400 teachers and 24,000 students to find where learning broke down, then observed classrooms and interviewed students and teachers to learn why commonly missed items were misunderstood. Mathematicians, math educators and technology experts matched the gaps to the Common Core standards, and those objectives fed into every Math Snacks game.

Hungry gophers are after a prized carrot, and the player defends it by placing units on a coordinate grid. Each unit has to be set at a coordinate pair, so the placing is the practice.

The designers applied the Learning Games Design Model to the idea of placing coordinate pairs on a plane. They worked so that the game would do more than provide practice, and would help learners who had not met the idea before to build their own understanding through play.

The Math Snacks website, mathsnacks.com, is online in November 2026 and describes itself as smart educational animations, games and interactive tools that help middle-grade learners understand math concepts. Game Over Gopher has its own page, with links to play in English or in Spanish.

On that page the gophers are space gophers. Players place ruby drills at given coordinates to earn rubies, the in-game currency, use a Carrot Launcher and a Corn Silo to feed the gophers, and play a bonus round in which a robot is guided across the grid. The topics are plotting points, negative and positive coordinates and the four quadrants, and the page calls the game Common Core-compliant.

The page credits support from the National Science Foundation and says the project was led by Karin Wiburg from 2009 to 2015 and by Karen Trujillo from 2016 to 2019. It does not state a cost and lists no app for this game. Math games are grouped in the games directory.