Starting this year, there’s been an increase in the number of computer games at school. They’re called “educational software,” but that’s debatable. Honestly, I think my kids are learning more from games like Katamari and Plants vs. Zombies.
Here’s an example. Go to ABCya dot com and click on sugar_sugar.htm. It’s a “physics game.” Basically, sugar comes down from the top of the screen and you have to divert it into the right place. That does sound fun and interesting, but marginally educational. I didn’t appreciate my kids coming home from school and wanting to play it. I don’t appreciate having their valuable school time being used playing games, especially when the time they spend in “technology” class is time they used to spend in gym – which is now two days a week.
Here’s something that’s educational, but the ratio of wasted time vs. learning time is too high. STMath dot com. Our school district spent money on it. It’s an “intervention” for struggling students. It teaches math using visual concepts and lets kids progress to the next level when they have “mastered the concept” as measured by their success at correctly answering ten questions with one or fewer mistakes. So, for instance, you know carrying in addition? (That’s now called regrouping, by the way.) It used to be so simple. You line numbers up in neat little columns and follow a pretty simple process that works just as well for ten-digit numbers as for two-digit ones. In this game, though, it’s all based on flower petals. Flower petals represent the ones place, flowers represent the tens place, and bundles of flowers represent the hundreds place. To do the regrouping correctly, you have to count the petals and flowers and bundles accurately and “regroup” them into one number. Now, my second grade daughter knows regrouping. But she can’t “master this concept.” Why not? Because it’s hard to count flower petals that are scattered all over a computer screen!
Meanwhile, I doubt it’s helping the struggling students. They could probably shuffle flowers around, but without direct instruction it can’t be easy to translate this into a concept that can be done with pencil and paper in neat little rows. And if you’re going to have a teacher who can do the difficult job of translating the visual concept into the numerical one, what do you even need the computer program for?
The claim on the website is that “schools which implement more than 50% of the program get fewer students at the lowest performance levels, and more at the highest performance levels. Schools below 50% proficiency to begin with have averaged 15 to 20 point gains in proficiency within two years.” Hard to say what that means. What does it mean to implement more than 50% of the program? How much time is involved? What is the scale being used for this “15 to 20 point gains”? In other words, is this real, or is this rhetoric?
Delving more deeply, I clicked on the page that discusses research done with Arizona schools. (By the way, was this research vetted by a Human Subjects Research committee?) Here’s what it says:
Kristin Ann King 