Week 7

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.