More than 20 online video games, like “Junk Pile” and “Endanger,” at SumDog.com create an environment of friendly competition and peer-to-peer communication between first through sixth graders as they learn math lessons that are aligned to the Common Core, the Milford Daily News reports from Massachusetts.
“It’s just another tool,” Principal Craig Consigli at Woodland Elementary School was quoted as saying. “I don’t think they even realize they’re learning, but this has been a great way to reinforce the skills they learn in class.”
Around the world, more than 5 million students have played the free online games, which adapt to each student’s ability by giving more difficult questions as students respond quickly with correct answers. Students at Woodland Elementary have been encouraged to log into the website and play the games against each other or against kids from around the world for the last three years.
“I was looking for a way to get my students to practice after school,” said Ann Anderson, a fourth-grade teacher at the school who started with the free online games in her classroom three years ago and has seen it take off. “They would tell me they had no time to do their homework, but they all had time to play their video games.”
For reading and writing, teachers can create subscription accounts that carry a nominal fee of about $2 per student per year. They can also get fancier reports for a subscription, but just playing is completely free.
Students can also earn coins that they can use to purchase attire, such as cool shades or t-shirts, for their avatars. At Woodland Elementary, Mr Consigli takes care of the rewards in his own way: He has offered, say, the top 10 students tickets to a Pawtucket Red Sox game.
Friendly competition is a strong motivator for students, of course. Martin Covington writes:
Based on the accumulating research it is concluded that the quality of student learning as well as the will to continue learning depends closely on an interaction between the kinds of social and academic goals students bring to the classroom, the motivating properties of these goals and prevailing classroom reward structures.
This review has been cited in almost 1,000 peer-reviewed research articles, and it adopts a common-sense approach to student motivation, saying that many factors probably play a role besides competition. What motivates a student may also depend on temporal shifts in the importance of the various contributing motivational factors.
In the meantime, there’s nothing like a good game of Junk Pile. The system tracks students’ accuracy and speed—important metrics for the Common Core’s reliance on fluency—so teachers can set goals that have nothing to do with extrinsic prizes but with intrinsic motivators, such as how students feel a sense of accomplishment that they’re the best they can be.