Video Games, Loving Math, and a Free Workshop

Can turning math into a game help learning? Plus a free workshop this weekend!

Join us for a free homeschooling math workshop this Saturday with the Co-founder of Prodigy! Sign up here.

During the pandemic, I developed a curriculum planning tool to support parents in finding the ideal learning program to fit their child’s needs. Recently, I launched and am expanding an AI concierge which works already, and I’m continually developing, to support families in finding exactly the right curriculum fit in any subject.

This was based on a comprehensive review of nearly 2000 conversations with homeschooling families and follow-ups, exploring whether factors like autism, dyslexia, ADHD, and different activities like playing outside, playing with video games, etc impacted their child’s ideal learning curriculum.

It makes a lot of sense, right?

If a kid likes video games, but hates math, they might like a math curriculum that’s a video game.

Yes, we found that be true.

It doesn’t take a degree in neuroscience to make this leap.

Furthermore, once math became a video game, bing! Low confidence gone. Bing! Not seeing the point of math gone. Bing! Math anxiety game. Gone. Love of learning. Here! Tada!

Gamification and Neurodiversity

We especially found that children with certain learning profiles, like Autism, did very well with video-game based math tools, but other children with profiles like ADHD got overwhelmed and drained.

But then again, not all kids like video games. Some children prefer playing outside or building blocks. Some are drawn to games, but get exhausted or ornery with too much online activity.

I say this with a HUGE caveat: The autism spectrum is so varied and vast, that I would never go so far as to draw a conclusion here. In fact, I prefer to look at what activities kids like as opposed to their learning diagnoses when recommending homeschooling resources. But it’s a guidepost that can be useful, especially as so many kids struggle with dry, boring worksheets at school.

Learning to Love Mtath

Every parent wants their kid to love learning.

And actually, it’s not such a tough equation.

In my experience helping over 100,000 families navigate Covid-19 and beyond the world of modular learning and homeschooling the single biggest factor in loving vs loathing learning was finding a curriculum that kid enjoyed.

Like a video game.

For a kid who likes video games.

To play math.

Now, here’s a catch. Not every video game is good. Not by a long shot. Actually, it’s pretty hard to build a decent, or even great video game. And also, if you want your child to play it to learn, it’s probably a good idea if it teaches relevant math well and uses a mastery-based approach.

Here’s one we like a lot: Prodigy Game.

During the pandemic, some volunteers from School Closures and two passionate college students (Julie Vuong and Elvin Lin) founded a non-profit that gave free tutoring to kids. (It was called Mastery Hour. And unfortunately, after Julie and Elvin got into grad school and got real jobs, respectively, we couldn’t raise the funding to keep it going, though we still match kids with volunteer tutors on a case by case basis.)

We decided to focus on math because it was a big pain point, and we figured we could optimize the program by narrowing in on one subject.

What we found is that a lot of math majors were excited to teach, but needed something to guide them. They didn’t have the skills to create mastery-based math curriculum. So what we did, is we had the kids play Prodigy Game during their sessions, and we trained the tutors on developmentally appropriate communication. As the kids played, the teachers would stop and use the white board when they got stuck, or occasionally if they saw a child was moving too fast, they’d ask them to explain their work.

This was a gamechanger for us, no pun intended.

Several kids jumped 2 or 3 grade levels. And our NPS scores jumped from 2-3 to consistenly perfect 5’s for every session from the tutor and the tutee.

Since then, I’ve become friends with the founders of Prodigy, learned much more about their program and have started to collaborate to make this math video game even more great for homeschoolers.

Here’s an interview we did together where we talk about my experience coordinating volunteer tutors to support children with math using Prodigy, and their distinct approach to gamifying math, focusing on a mastery-based approach that keeps kids in the zone of proximal development for optimal drive and learning pleasure (not too hard, not too easy)

As you saw last week, we’re hosting a workshop with the co-founder of Prodigy, Rohan Mahimker to support parents in homeschooling math, and also to give Prodigy our feedback on how they can make their tool better for homeschooling families.

It’s totally free to attend, and I hope you can join us!

It should be a wonderful conversation about math gamification and all the rest.