Struggling Learner Turns to Prodigy

Motivation is difficult to come by in a Mathematics classroom. Through games and technology students tend to put more effort in because they receive instant results and praise for their successes no matter how small the achievements might be. When students are always told they are not good at math they tend to start to believe it.

While teaching struggling math students in an AIS (academic intervention services) class, I discovered an interactive online game called Prodigy that gave student motivation. In Prodigy, players create wizard characters they use to maneuver through worlds to collect wands, garments, coins, pets and complete missions. In order to do these things students would have to battle wizards and the only way to land successful attacks is to answer math problems! To attack an opposing wizards students must correctly answer a math problem to land their spell. If the problem is answered incorrectly the spell will miss and then the opposing wizard will get their shot to land a spell.

The game is aligned with common core standards of mathematics for grades 1 – 8. Students have a few tutorial battles with wizards that the site uses as a baseline assessment. This way when the students first begins to play Prodigy they are not given questions that are overly difficult for their individual math skill set.

Students were extremely motivated and worked very hard to get their questions correct in order to collect pets and other items which lead to them leveling up. Even though the graphics and game play seemed gear to younger ages, the middle school students I had playing it did enjoy it a lot (even if they wouldn’t admit it because it seemed uncool). Since their accounts were created by me, the teacher, I would get e-mails once a week with data on gaps in student learning, number of minutes logged, number of questions answered, and much more. It was wonderful information to have as a teachers.

There were a couple of downfalls to the game. The fact that the math problems had no real connection to what the characters were doing in the game left some holes in the process. The questions could have been about any subject. Students were not motivated by the math but just saw it as an obstacle that they had to get through.

Also, the game falls in the category of Freemium. This means that the game was free but students could level up their characters and accrue more goods within the game if they paid money with their parent’s credit card. This feature had absolutely no effect on the math portion of the game. When students were prompted to become premium members and pay money to do so I always told them to never take that option.

Overall the game motivated struggling learners and gave them confidence as they leveled up their characters and collected more items within the game. I passed it along to colleagues and parents who also saw similar results in learning.