Hi Thomas, I'll respond to the game design rather than how to program this if that's OK.
I used to have f2f students play something like this in my non-academic math classes (gr. 9 - 11) when they didn't know their times tables. A student would make a complete list of all the math facts he needed to learn & then make up a deck of say 15 cards using whichever facts from the list he wanted to practise first (question on one side and answer on the other). To play, he'd lay out the deck and start answering the questions in any order he wanted. If he got a question right, he put a check on the card & set it aside. If not, the card would be returned to the array and tried again after at least 2 more cards had been tried. Once the deck was done or 15 minutes maximum had passed, he'd set it aside & try it again later -- all of it. When a card had earned 10 checks marks (was answered correctly on the first try 10 times), it was torn up and thrown away for good. That fact was considered 'mastered' and crossed off the list. This number was high because the entire list was tables that he found troublesome. The student would play his deck 3 times x 3 times per day, so the deck would be whittled down fast. When there were 5 cards left, he'd add 10 new cards with facts from his original list.
Once he was down to his final 5 cards, we'd then work up memory strategies for those facts together. There were lots of different ways to get the student to practise those, but the main two were:,(a) surprise single card drill and (b) making sure when the student did a question in a math exercise using that fact he took a moment to take out the corresponding card & rehearse the memory strategy. When the student discovered he knew the fact, that card was given to me and glued to a goofy certificate of recognition just for fun.
This game was phenomenally successful in teaching math facts to students who'd never learned them as kids because they always led from their strength even in a topic that had defeated them for so long. It was also fast to play & stopped before it became frustrating. It capitalized on the now evidence-based practise of spaced practise + something I got from a book called the Zen of Running which said basically to stop while you're feeling good so you'll want to run again the next day. I've been working on a powerpoint approximation of this game, and I'm close except the entire game starts up each time.
Regarding your game, here are my thoughts:
(1) With multiple choice questions, a correct guess counts as a right answer. I would not deem a fact 'known' until the player got a card correct 3 times (with the choices shuffled each time the card was played if possible). Only then would I remove it from the deck.
(2) I'd keep the deck small (15 cards? 20?) so it can be played in 15 minutes max. and put in a timer so it can't be played again until the next day. This spaces the review and gives the student time to forget, so when the same card is seen again, he has to search his memory for the answer. Also limiting the game to 15 minutes means attention is less likely to lapse.
(3) When Deck 1 is whittled down to 5 cards, all 5 could go into a permanent review deck, and the learner would start Deck 2. The last 5 cards from Deck 2 would also get moved to the permanent review deck (and so on for all decks in that group). This permanent deck would be kept for pre-exam study because it contains all the hardest questions for that student. You might even program into the course surprise permanent deck review points when the learner would receive a message to play that review deck to keep those hardest facts fresh & minimize the need for cramming. He might be prompted to write a reflection and send itcto the instructor or a peer mentor.
(4) If a student is really keen, you might encourage him to play 2 different decks each day. By capping this kind of practise to 30 min per day &! because the decks are different, concentration should be maintained.
(5) If the course has an online instructor presence, you could have the LMS signal him/her about any cards a learner gets wrong say 2 days in a row so the instructor can intervene personally. If the course is completely self-taught, you might instead block further progress in a deck until the learner does a review activity -- a reading or video with text entry questions.
I'm still trying to make my ppt. model more closely approximate this kind of play. I've found a super & cheap tool that exports ppt as a fully interactive file and so can be played inside an LMS.
In ppt, slides can easily be copied by a player to a new file, so the students would have to build their own permanent review decks. The problem is that I have an entire times tables game of up to 25 questions on a single slide, so that doesn't help much.
My game continues to be a work in progress...... good luck with yours.
-Sue
