In which I complain about Educational Stuff once again (and highly recommend Beast Academy)

[cahn]

It's been *checks* a few months since I last complained about anything the kids are going through educationally, soooooo obviously it is time for me to complain about something else!

A's class uses a math computer program/app called "Prodigy." This is an internet-based (I think there is an app as well) program that is supposed to Make Math Fun. In practice, this seems to occur by giving kids avatars that wander through a little land and collect prizes, and sometimes they have to solve a math problem. (Note that although this description makes it sound like the problems are related to the wandering and prize collecting, they are actually completely decoupled.)

I have three main issues with Prodigy:

1. I'm vaguely opposed to education-gamify-apps in general -- I feel like there's something to be said in showing kids that the subject itself is fascinating (see also everything I've learned about 18th C history in the last couple of years :P --that wasn't because I had to, but because the actual subject was made fun for me) and not into turning it into something that is fun because of bells and whistles.

But on the other hand this is more of a vague objection, because let's face it, I was brought up on Oregon Trail, which a) has just about no educational value whatsoever b) even if there were, we all spent all our time playing the mini-game where you shot vaguely-pixelated forms that were supposed to resemble animals used for food c) I don't really feel like my life was worse because I played Oregon Trail; if anything, it's better because it's this memory that unites our US-educated generation, so... this is a thing that My Ideal School Would Not Do, but not enough for me to have done anything about.

2. The problems are too easy for A. I'm not sure whether this is a teacher or a Prodigy problem, because the teacher has assured us that she can change the difficulty level, but they're still really not hard enough. It's getting to the point where A. has decided he's bored with it, which, yeah, that's a problem.

3. It turns out that Prodigy is basically just all a big advertisement for getting parents to buy the monthly subscription for their child. It's apparently set up in such a way that if you buy the subscription you get, idk, the cool prizes and stuff. I don't agree with everything in this article, but For example, kids without memberships literally walk in dirt while kids with memberships ride around on clouds seems to be spot on.

I didn't pay all that much attention to it (idk, I feel like a lot of time gets wasted in school, I'm a bit resigned to it) until A. started bugging me for a membership ($10/month). I told him absolutely not. (In theory he could (almost) pay for it himself with his allowance ($2/week), which apparently one child at school is doing; in practice there are other things he'd rather do with his money.) Then A's FRIEND started bugging me to buy A a membership! Apparently he is the only kid in his 5-person class (he goes to this tiny startup school) who does not have a membership, because once one kid got it all the other parents were pressured more and gave in (except me, because this is the kind of thing where the more you pressure me the more I decide it's evil and dig my heels in). Fortunately the whole point of his school is to be inclusive and non-cliquish, and he is well-liked enough that he's not going to suffer from loss of social cred -- though I imagine this is part of why he doesn't like Prodigy any more, too, but... like... no. And then when I asked him about it last week he said he was bored, which was the final straw.

I talked to K, who is much smarter about this whole parenting thing than I am, and she was like, um, why not have him do Beast Academy Online at school instead? So: Beast Academy (again, hat tip to K, who told us about it when E was about A's age) is this AWESOME work that combines a graphic novel with learning about math, and has problems that are actually interesting and challenging. We have the entire paper-book series ("guides," which are the graphic novels, and "practice" books, which have problems in them -- they are workbooks, but workbooks that are actually interesting) and E worked her way through them over the years, and has now graduated on to the Art of Problem Solving books and classes (which I also absolutely recommend, along with their -- free! -- online problem generator/learning system Alcumus). And A. had started with the books but we hadn't gotten all that far yet.

These books a) make the math content fun/palatable to kids by putting it in graphic novel-story form (with cute monsters! And humor -- "sad little not-a-polygon," in the chapter about shapes where polygons are defined, has entered our family humor reservoir) but b) has the educational philosophy that kids learn from and are engaged by doing interesting problems, not that kids have to be tricked into learning with slick gameplay c) the problems are more interesting and challenging and require you to understand the material more deeply than in other math apps/curriculum I've seen d) they have challenge problems that can actually sometimes get pretty darn difficult. And e) they basically follow the Common Core curriculum, so no issues with integrating into the normal curriculum, they just go a little deeper.

Beast Academy was designed for strong math students. I would not necessarily recommend Beast Academy to a child who is not into math -- although, no, scratch that, if it were my kid I'd even more want them to do it; only I'd give them the grade level one or two behind their actual grade level, and be aware that I'd have to do a lot more hands-on help.

Anyway, fortunately he goes to a school that is extremely flexible (and honestly probably a little too much student/parent led, but since my particular kids are quite academically oriented, and every once in a while I bestir myself to complain about their academics, I guess that's ok??) so I emailed the teacher and asked if he could do Beast Academy, and she was totally up with that. (I should mention that there is a monthly/yearly fee, but I was happy to pay that.) So we got it all working last weekend and he has a shiny username and everything and is super excited, and we'll see how it goes. Right now it's still pretty easy for him (though not as easy as Prodigy) because he's doing material that he already did in the workbooks, so we'll see how it goes when he's done enough that he's going into new territory. At any rate I am pleased that he's no longer wasting half an hour every other day with stuff that's way too easy for him.

But can I say that, as usual, Art of Problem Solving has just done a REALLY REALLY good job with this. It's so rare in this world to find something that has both good content AND good delivery, and Art of Problem Solving has both. Well, I can't speak to the kid experience so much (I'm also basing this on E taking online classes with them, which I was quite impressed by, especially after seeing the crap job that CTY did with their user interfaces when she took an online class with them), but someone there has really thought this through, including the parenting interface. I can see every single problem he can, I can see exactly what he's doing, I have complete freedom to lock or unlock so that he doesn't decide he wants to skip and do Level 3 stuff that he doesn't have the prereqs for (that was today's discovery, haha -- I'd left it open on purpose because I hadn't figured out the whole system yet and wanted to give him some flexibility, but when I went in and looked at details, he was trying to do things he didn't quite yet know how to do), but I can unlock all the level 2 stuff he should already know so he can skip through that if he wants. I AM A FAN.

...In general, I feel like the educational pendulum has swung exactly the opposite way from when I was a kid. When I was a kid there was definitely too much boring stuff -- I was absolutely bored out of my mind a lot of the time. But now I feel like it's exactly the opposite; everything has to be Super Fun. And I worry -- well, I don't worry my kids will get out of school not knowing anything, but that's because I have a LOT of resources. I worry about this entire generation either getting out of school not knowing anything or not able to do anything unless it comes with a shiny app... although I suppose they'll learn it eventually? Maybe?

Comments

[thistleingrey]

2. Too easy: Prodigy's problem. Reason spent some time with Prodigy, too, to the extent of illicit borrowing of a credit card in order to subscribe, which was a learning experience(tm) ... and then she stopped.

Agreed re: odd overemphasis on Fun.

[cahn]

Oh boy, that... yeah, sounds like a Learning Experience.

Yeah, I've talked to a few more parents now and I have yet to find a parent who likes it. (The funny thing is that when I look online teachers seem to like it -- it's free and they can see what the kids are doing, which apparently is a low bar that other apps don't meet??)

[cenozoicsynapsid]

I actually had a whole conversation with a friend about Oregon Trail a few months ago, which I think branched off a discussion about when historical settings for tabletop RPGs were or weren't educational. I agree that Oregon Trail didn't do a very good job contextualizing the decisions you had to make... I suggested at the time that I would have learned more by playing a trail guide, who had to decide what routes were best for the different kinds of wagon trains, guess which parties were likely to succeed in the first place, and see how travel on the trail changed over the years. By the end of the game, some of the travelers might be turning you down to take the train, or you'd have to worry about changing routes to avoid the Civil War. I think gamifying can really work, if the game mechanics actually force you to consider the same factors that the historical decision-makers would have. Do you read Bret Deveraux's history blog? There was a fun series a few weeks ago about how Europa Universalis teaches its players about industrialization and World War I.

[cahn]

Yeah, that actually sounds like it would be a fascinating and educational game.

I think gamifying can really work, if the game mechanics actually force you to consider the same factors that the historical decision-makers would have.

I agree -- there's a difference between gamification as "let me gamify this in a way that makes it 'fun' to do something that I regard as intrinsically not fun," which I think something like Habitica does (which I actually do like a lot and use because laundry is really intrinsically not all that fun!) but which I think is not always the best choice for an education tool, and "let me gamify this by throwing into relief the fascinating parts and showing you how fascinating they are," which I think can be a really effective learning tool.

Beast Academy also does this well -- it "gamifies" in the graphic novels by introducing math concepts through these little monsters, but they're always trying to solve problems or puzzles, and the graphic novels lean into them having insights and making the conceptual steps to solve the problem, which I think works really well.

I do not read that blog, but that sounds really cool, I should start!

[brainwane]

ACOUP is a ton of fun!

[cahn]

:) Thanks for the added rec!

[mildred_of_midgard]

I have complete freedom to lock or unlock so that he doesn't decide he wants to skip and do Level 3 stuff that he doesn't have the prereqs for

WHY CAN'T DUOLINGO BE LIKE THIS?? I am a grown-up! I know how I learn! I should be able to repeat exercises and skip ahead at will. The fact that I can't work at my own pace is why I'm not using Duolingo for other languages. I used it for German because I skipped to the short stories, which worked great. But only a couple languages have short stories, and the forced pacing of the word and sentence exercises is not what I want *and* makes me feel condescended to, so no.

[cahn]

RIGHT?? Even if you are a kid, just make it so the parent can have control over the account! It wouldn't work for me with French at all if I wanted to improve my grammar, say, because there are specific parts I am weak on because i didn't get them in class (as a result of moving schools and getting caught between two tracks, so there were things I learned twice and things I didn't learn at all).

[mildred_of_midgard]

I found a feature request where someone requested the ability to go back over exercises, and Duolingo support idiotically replied that they get too much feedback that their stuff is too slow anyway. If you need to practice something, just keep going because you'll run into it again!

Idiotic because OBVIOUSLY people are coming in with different backgrounds and different learning styles and learning at different paces. If you binge through it, then yeah, it'll be too slow, but if you get sidetracked by real life and want to come back to it later, you might have forgotten stuff! And some people were complaining that they needed waaaay more practice with Cyrillic or Hebrew alphabets before they got thrown into vocabulary, and they just couldn't go over the simple exercises before being thrown off the deep end into stuff. Which made them go and find something to use that wasn't Duolingo.

Because OBVIOUSLY learning isn't one-size-fits-all! And, like, I work in tech, so you can't convince me that this would be a super difficult feature to implement*. Tracking people's current level and unlocking stuff for them dynamically is technically more difficult!

* I understand that for a traditional class with a teacher and a grade, this is a harder problem to solve, but--this is an app!

And Duolingo is so great in so many ways, I just can't with the lack of flexibility. I'll teach myself, thank you very much.

[mildred_of_midgard]

When I was a kid there was definitely too much boring stuff -- I was absolutely bored out of my mind a lot of the time.

I always felt like they were always trying to make things fun for us, and the things that were fun for other people are extremely Unfun for me, and vice versa. This continued to be a problem well into college. But unlike some of my other methodological complaints, I'm willing to accept that this one is my alien brain. ;)

[cahn]

I had some teachers who were like that, who were generally really good -- and some of their methods would, yeah, have been Unfun for you (all the ones that involved physical objects :P ) -- but there was a lot of drills and doing worksheets and exercises that were all the same thing ten times.

[mildred_of_midgard]

all the ones that involved physical objects :P

Yes, those. It's like you know me or something. :P

there was a lot of drills and doing worksheets and exercises that were all the same thing ten times.

That was boring for me in the sense that it was too slow, but not boring in the sense that it was Unfun. Drills and worksheets and exercises were fun for me, I just wanted them to go faster *because* they were fun!

(K)

[(Anonymous)]

Have they given you the ability to lock the videos and online versions of the guide yet? D's membership has expired, so I can't check anymore. But I used to worry about her defaulting to just reading the guides rather than solving problems.

(For anyone else reading this, I'll reiterate that the guides are incredibly well-done and entertaining. I think my kid read the entire series about thirty times, primarily for plot and jokes. But she absorbed tons of math along the way. Nonetheless, when she was supposed to be ACTUALLY SOLVING PROBLEMS, the guides were a distraction.)

Re: (K)

[cahn]

As far as I can tell there isn't a way to lock the videos or online guide, but there is a way to see how much time is being spent on that versus problem solving, so I assume if it came to that we could have a talk. :) (And that the part where I can watch exactly what he's doing would be a deterrent.) But you're right, it would be easier if I could just lock them -- we have the paper guides, he doesn't need the online ones at all.