MATCHBOXES™ Matching Game

MATCHBOXES™ is, as I say, an irresistibly fun matching game. It is similar in concept to the card game Concentration. You start with a grid of boxes having hidden contents. You click any two boxes and see if their contents match. When two boxes are matched successfully, they disappear from the grid. The game ends when all the boxes are gone. You earn a score based on your speed and the accuracy of your match attempts.

MATCHBOXES™ is designed to incentivize learning. I would classify it as an 'edutainment' application. To get a high score, you must first explore the grid (by double-clicking individual boxes) and then match boxes accurately. Indiscriminate match-making is discouraged; indeed too many wrong match attempts will decimate your score. Use MATCHBOXES™ to master—or to demonstrate your mastery of—vocabulary or trivia items, not to see how fast you can click a mouse. There is a speed component to the MATCHBOXES™ scoring system, but speed is secondary to accuracy unless you're extraordinarily slow.

I developed MATCHBOXES™ for classroom as well as personal use. Optionally, the boxes in the grid may be labeled with numbers. This enables the teacher to go around the room, from student to student or from group to group, saying, "Give me two numbers." The teacher may reward a successful match by giving points or candy, and/or by letting the same student/group try another match.

A nice feature of this app is that it does not limit you to canned data categories (though the number of those is sure to increase). MATCHBOXES™ enables you to create and save your own data categories locally. Thus you can use the MATCHBOXES™ game engine with whatever vocabulary or trivia items interest you.

Another feature: If you right-click anywhere on the MATCHBOXES™ game interface, you will be given the option of installing this application on your local machine. MATCHBOXES™ running out-of-browser has a great look and feel and doesn't require an Internet connection. (Note: If you're not connected to the Internet, you'll have to use locally-defined data categories.)

Full screen version

Here is MATCHBOXES™ embedded as a 600 x 450-pixels widget:

To embed this app in your own web page, simply copy this code snippet into your HTML:

<div style="width:600px;height:450px;"><script src="http://www.kgsteely.com/apps/embedmatch.php" type="text/javascript"></script></div>

Feel free to tweak the style of the div, including the width and height attributes, but bear in mind that 600 x 450 is the minimum feasible size for this app.

If you want a particular data category to load up automatically (once the player name dialog is dismissed), add a query string parameter as follows:

<div style="width:600px;height:450px;"><script src="http://www.kgsteely.com/apps/embedmatch.php?parm=Summer Olympics Cities" type="text/javascript"></script></div>

The query string parameter may be set to any value from the category dropdown in the game interface.

Re the embedding of MATCHBOXES™ on other sites, the app

• is XHTML 1.0 Strict-compliant;
• requires Microsoft's Silverlight browser plug-in to be installed on users' machines;
• is offered freely and in good faith—but AS IS, with no warranties expressed or implied;
• may be changed or made unavailable at any point, with or without notice;
• is copyrighted intellectual property.