About FlickForge

FlickForge is about the physics of the flick — the maths hiding inside games like carrom and crokinole, where you strike a disc and it slides, banks off the rails, and slows to a stop. It is built for ages 9–14, and it is a thinking game, not a reflex game.

Predict, observe, explain

On the Predict screen the shot is already aimed for you. Your job is to predict where the disc will come to rest — the near, middle, or far band — before you see it move. Then the sim runs, draws the exact path, and you reconcile: was it the power, or the bounce angle, that decided where it stopped? Predicting first (even when you are wrong) is what makes the idea stick.

Three ideas it teaches

  • Friction decay. A disc slows steadily and stops — more power means it travels farther, but not forever.
  • The bank shot (angle in = angle out). A disc bounces off a rail at the mirror of the angle it arrived — so you can aim off a wall to reach a spot you cannot hit straight.
  • Momentum transfer. A moving disc that hits a resting one of equal size stops and sends the other one on — the carrom strike.

How it is built

The table runs on a small, pure, deterministic physics solver written just for this — not a third-party physics engine. That matters: the same shot always produces the same path, so a prediction can be graded fairly and the maths is reproducible on any device (pinned by automated tests). It uses no heavy 3-D or graphics libraries, so it runs on a school Chromebook. Nothing about your play leaves your device. Honest note: FlickForge builds reasoning about angles, momentum, and friction through prediction and practice — it makes no exam or skill-transfer claim.