This week was all about coding and bringing technology into the classroom! There was one particular platform that caught my eye which was Prodigy. Prodigy is a platform that gamifies both math and English but I looked at the math version only. The reason this actually caught my eye because I have seen this site used in a grade 5/6 split already. The students love it because from I’ve seen is it is quite similar to Pokeman in how the game is leveled and what you can do with the different animals/creatures in the game. Students like the game because it does allow them to try the questions more than once and they get questions that cover all parts of math and that have to be answered different ways, some of the questions are multiple answer questions where some are ones where you need to type in your own answer. I think this platform is great cause it also allows you as a teacher to track your students progress and see how each individual is doing. It is also a free program that you can set your class up on which is great. Now there is a pitfall that once students reach a certain point with certain characters you have to play at home and get your parents to pay to unlock them which can feel discouraging to to students.

What are the benefits of gamifying math?

For some students math is very challenging and hard for students to get into and that’s where I think platforms like Prodigy come in handy. It does a great job of motivating students and getting them to keep trying at different questions. In order to win battles and different animals/creatures they have to complete a certain amount of questions correctly and I think this is a great motivators for those students who might get discouraged easily. One thing that I do love about this platform is how it does allow students multiple try’s and a question and if they still don’t get it it will show they the right answer.

What are some of the downfalls of gamifying math?

Although the platform does allow multiple tries and does show students the correct answer it doesn’t show them how to get to it which means they aren’t going to necessarily learn how to correct their mistakes. This means if we want our students to learn something we will need to pay attention and when they get something wrong you have to catch it and show them how to get to the correct answer so that they learn the how and not just the what. In math you need to learn the procedure as well as the correct answer and you cannot effectively learn one without the other. I think that this is the overall biggest downfall of gamifying a subject like math in this way because your students miss out on this major part of the learning process.

The featured image is from the website Zumako.