Assignment 1

URL: http://www.funbrain.com/

Goal : funbrain is a K-8 targeted educational game sight.

Funbrain.com Review

Funbrain.com boasts that they are the #1 website for educational games for children K-8. I guess my question to them would be, #1 in what? Funbrain is divided into four distinct sections: “math games” which predictably has links to games involving math, “reading” who have some grammar and reading comprehension exercises but also inexplicably transports users away from funbrain to sites trying to sell comics to kids(I was offered a great deal on “Galactic Hotdogs”), “fun arcade” and “playground”. I will focus the remainder of this review on the math games and reading section.

In the math games section I played two games: “Math Baseball” and “Space Slingshot”. “Math Baseball” was what Hirsh-Pasek described as a first wave educational product which essentially just digitized traditional arithmetic worksheets of which we were all so fond. The game makes some effort to engage the user by tallying runs and outs and presenting the user with “high risk/reward” situations where they are encourage to drive in runs by answering questions correctly. A positive aspect of “Math Baseball” is the user defined difficulty and content parameters. Before starting, the user may choose which arithmetic operations to include in the game and what difficulty these operations should be performed at.

“Space Slingshot” was a more engaging, though also a less purely educational, game. In “Space Slingshot” a player is asked to solve addition and subtraction problems by firing aliens from a slingshot at bubbles containing the correct answer. This style of play is far more interesting than simply entering answers into a text box, however the difficulty was not variable and thus was quite basic in its problems.

In the reading section I played the game “Grammar Gorilla.” Like “Math Baseball”, “Grammar Gorilla” is essentially a digital version of a grammar worksheet that one would find in elementary school workbooks. The colorful dancing gorilla’s on the sides of the screen distracted from the activity and added little in the way of engaging content. “Grammar Gorilla” does provide detailed explanations of every part of speech, however it does not prompt the user to consult these explanations upon getting a question wrong.

Despite funbrain.com’s claims to be the #1 education site, I think it leaves a lot to be desired. Their games encouraged wrote learning in the absence of conceptual frameworks and provided little to engage the user beyond what a pencil and paper worksheet would. What’s more, the lack of instructional material after getting questions wrong means that a user could get stuck in loops and reinforce misunderstandings of concepts. All in all, funbrain.com is a primitive educational technology good only for getting kids repetitions on basic skills.

 

 

 

Funbrain.com Redesign

I have two major areas for improvement for funbrain. The first is that more emphasis needs to be placed on the educational content. Upon finishing “Math Baseball”, I was prompted to play games such as “Penguin Invader” and “Super He” which fall in the “fun arcade” section of the site. As the site’s major usefulness is providing children in need of drill extra repetitions with basic grammar and arithmetic skills, it is important to loop them not to mindless flash games but instead more practice on the same or similar skills. Learning Science has shown us that uninterrupted periods of learning are far more effective than ones punctuated with non-educational and distracting material. Furthermore, many of the suggested games at the end of “Math Baseball” actually transported the user away from funbrain to paid sights. Funbrain should be a self-contained ecosystem, with the possible exception of sourcing lessons or instructional pieces from third parties.

The second area for improvement is the feedback given in funbrain games. It is important that when a user gets a question wrong they are alerted to the fact and presented with either the right answer, or some material in which they can ascertain the correct answer. Expecting young children to be able to dig through blocks of text to find a mistake they haven’t even identified is absurd.