Bongo Balance

In Bongo Balance, students learn techniques for balancing chemical equations as they balance fruit to feed fair portions to two hungry jungle animals. Players add and subtract groups of fruit in order to feed an equal amount of every type of fruit to each animal (see Figure 1). Some groupings are harder than others, until players learn to multiply types of fruit by coefficients as they would with subscripts and coefficients in chemical equations. Gradually, the representation of the components of the equation changes from fruit to fruit-with-subscripts, and finally to molecules-with-subscripts, so that by the end of the game, the player is working with a recognizable chemical equation (see Figure 2).