Pembroke Pines students hit the video game joysticks last month for an academic cause: mathematics.

That’s because the IGFA Fishing and Hall of Fame Museum in Dania Beach hosted a multiplayer math video game tourney designed to teach lower-income students interactive arithmetic-oriented problem-solving skills, said James Chinn, the tournament’s coordinator.

“I grew up playing Atari, but when I saw the learning environment the kids would be using, my jaw hit the floor,” said Chinn, a secondary math curriculum specialist for Broward Schools. “The kids just want to play the game whether there are prime numbers and equations or not.”

Roughly 32 teams attending schools across Broward participated in the virtual reality-style game Tabula Digita, a Halo-esque first-person environment where players jump around and land on positive and negative platforms by adding and subtracting numbers, said Chinn.

Competing players had to be enrolled in one of Broward’s Title 1 facilities, or schools where at least 50 percent of its students were on free and reduced lunch benefits.

Top winners received prizes like Nintendo DS game systems, iPod Shuffles and iTunes gift cards.