Homework Is Starting to Look a Lot Like Candy Crush
One afternoon earlier this year, my 11-year-old son was sitting at his laptop and working quietly on his math homework. At least, that’s what he was supposed to be doing. When I glanced at his screen, equations were nowhere to be seen. He was controlling a monster in the midst of battle, casting magic spells to outduel an opposing player.“That’s not your math homework!” I told him. But it was. His fifth-grade-math teacher had told her students to spend time on Prodigy, a site that looks and feels like a video game. As my son indignantly showed me, Prodigy surfaces multiple-choice questions in between cartoon-monster attacks. Correctly identify an isosceles triangle or the square root of 49, and your “Aquadile” or “Bonasaur”—barely veiled rip-offs of Pokémon characters—gets a health boost that will help it fend off your opponent’s next salvo.Prodigy is among a bevy of gamified tools that have gained a foothold in classrooms across the country by promising to make learning fun. (As Prodigy’s website puts it: “Kids no longer have to choose between homework and playtime.”) These platforms—which also include Blooket, Gimkit, and Kahoot—can seem like a win-win. Students’ eyes light up at math-and-vocabulary-review sessions that once induced groans. Teachers, meanwhile, can use the games to track which questions kids get right and wrong, helping them triage trouble spots.But as I watched my son play Prodigy, it became clear there wasn’t much learning happening. In about 10 minutes of gameplay, he spent less than 30 seconds answering math questions. When he got one wrong, the game didn’t pause to diagnose where he went wrong or guide him to the correct answer. The only time he slowed down, grudgingly, was when Prodigy forced him to watch videos advertising its paid-membership plans. (Prodigy did not respond to a request for comment.)Other popular ed-tech games also lean into gaming more than learning. Gimkit lobs occasional multiple-choice questions in the middle of live, m