coolmath-games – EDUC 342: Child Development & New Technologies

Week 7

sandhini — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 08:51:33 +0000

I found the article on the cool-math games website extremely fascinating. It reminded me of Luminosity which was recently sued for millions of dollars for claiming to make games that improve your ‘brainpower’ when in actuality they did nothing. Cool-math games also seems to have an empty claim like this and what is even worse is that this is directed towards children who can be more vulnerable.

The paper mentioned that using cool-math games may actually increase the achievement gap. This seems like a dire negative effect of a seemingly helpful at best and innocuous at worst website. However, children may go on this website, play games and mentally attribute the time they spend on it as time spent doing math. However, if/when they see no improvement in there math, they may feel that they are naturally uninclined towards math and the fact that there are no results for all there work may be demotivating.

I played a few games on cool-math games after reading the paper and if they do improve math skills they do it in a HIGHLY indirect way. One game that I played involved making a character move through an easily navigable maze and collect stars. Absolutely no math skills and even problem solving skills. The idea of a child spending hours on something like this under the illusion that he/she is developing math skills makes me sad.

Such websites mislead people and take advantage of their vulnerability and really should be held accountable for the false claims they make.

Week 7 response

marcc — Wed, 17 Feb 2016 07:00:06 +0000

This week’s readings emphasized the important difference between thoughtful, well-designed learning games and ineffective games. I figured that Zhang was talking about Coolmath before she even named it because of that site’s reputation for shallow math games. I hope that Zhang’s study is not understood to mean that math games are ineffective. Berkowitz et al and the Devlin video both show how well-constructed games can measurably improve performance. The latter portions of Zhang, where she discussed how students in lower-performing states played more Coolmath, conjured the possibility in my mind that teachers and parents in those states might be directing their kids to Coolmath by a simplistic assumption that those math games will mechanistically boost math scores, and using the games as a replacement for more rigorous lessons.

Parents and teachers should be able to distinguish between good games and ineffective ones, as well as how to properly integrate such games as a part of their students’ academic diet. It is not enough for some ed-tech designers to know good practices for educational games. If those quality games are indistinguishable in the app store from lower-quality games, this barely helps the student population writ large. Perhaps there could be some sort of certification board, like the ESRB or MPAA, that could review and certify research-backed educational games?

Week 7: Math

ccolgan — Tue, 16 Feb 2016 17:34:43 +0000

The Zhang article made me wonder how students’ interactions with online math games have changed in the age of YouTube. From Ashley’s talk last week, we learned that kids are no longer using Google to search for content. In the article, from November 2012-October 2013, 6% of traffic to coolmath-games came from social media sites including YouTube. A higher percentage of traffic is likely coming from YouTube today.

I downloaded the YouTube Kids app and searched for “Cool Math Games.” Unsurprisingly, most of the content that came back were videos of kids playing the games on the Cool Math Games website. This peculiar “watching” phenomenon is so huge, I can’t help but wonder if there’s some way to leverage watching videos of gameplay into a learning experience.

Based on the data from Zhang’s research, the kids that are searching for this content are among the lowest performing. Is there a way to connect them with the help they need? Perhaps a new study (based on the data that YouTube has on its users) could link those interested in coolmath-games with a program to encourage families working together on math problems at home, the very beneficial practice discussed in the Berkowitz et al. article, and could compare the achievement of those with and without this intervention.