'Gamified' tools make homework into playtime

Credit: Prodigy Education

My Son’s Math Homework Is Essentially Just Pokémon, writes Will Oremus in The Atlantic.

His fifth-grader was assigned to play a video game that includes multiple-choice math questions in between monster attacks. Identify the square root of 49 and you get more "powers" to fight monsters.

“Kids no longer have to choose between homework and playtime,” Prodigy's web site boasts. Other platforms, such as Blooket, Gimkit, and Kahoot, also let students review math or vocabulary while playing games. —can seem like a win-win.

But, in 10 minutes of play, Oremus' son "spent less than 30 seconds answering math questions," he writes. "When he got one wrong, the game didn’t pause to diagnose where he went wrong or guide him to the correct answer."

Educational games date back to Math Blaster and Oregon Trail, typically played in the computer lab, he writes. "Only recently have web-based, free-to-play platforms become a staple of daily lesson plans and homework assignments." Nearly every student has their own desktop tablet or Chromebook.

Teachers say use should be limited to quick review sessions, he writes. However, games often are used to keep students occupied. "Ed-tech games also allow kids who finish their in-class assignments early to work ahead on their laptop, keeping them quiet and out of trouble until the bell rings," writes Oremus.

A well-designed game “can be extremely effective in not just getting kids interested in the subject matter, but to help them understand why they’re doing it in the first place,” Jan Plass, a professor of digital media and learning sciences at NYU, told Oremus. His example is a 2008 game called Immune Attack in which players "navigate a nanobot through a patient’s bloodstream to spur their immune system to fight off infections." The game is built around a scientific idea.

By contrast, "gamified tools such as Prodigy . . . simply bolt multiple-choice questions onto unrelated game templates," writes Oremus. The questions are a distraction from the point of the game, which is to kill monsters.