Homework shouldn’t be all fun and games

The gamification of school

Is our children learning?

Parents are increasingly frustrated with the way edtech is being used in schools. And they’re right to be!

In The Wall Street Journal, Shalini Ramachandran profiled parents horrified to learn their seventh grader had watched more than 13,000 YouTube videos, including deeply inappropriate ones. Jackie Mader profiled parents who, having diligently avoided screens at home, were appalled to learn an iPad would be issued to their kindergartener. And as they struggle to understand why young students get personal devices in school at all, parent groups that ask for the right to opt out of their child’s device use in school are gaining momentum.

This is all a stark reversal from the 2010s, when ensuring 1:1 device availability was often specifically a target for schools. Because now that they’ve hit that target (88% of schools say they give an individual device to every student), it turns out that it might have been a bad goal.

The latest manifestation of this frustration is this excellent article by Will Oremus in The Atlantic, about how he noticed his son’s math homework… is just a video game very occasionally interrupted by simple math problems:

“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.)”

It’s not just Prodigy, Oremus observed correctly; the entire premise of edtech companies like Gimkit or Blooket is making games with a minor educational element, with the ultimate result that “schools have embraced education software that has become hard to distinguish from Candy Crush.”

And while, like many bad edtech ideas before it, I understand why schools thought this sort of gamification might be a good idea, I think everyone would be better off if we took a step back and thought a bit harder about both learning and fun.

When gamification does (and doesn’t) work

It’s very obvious how we got here. Most educational programs don’t work because students don’t actually use them.

Khan Academy and programs like it are absolutely adequate to learn almost everything you learn in elementary school — if you’re diligent enough to sit down and work through the problems every day. But almost no one is.

So, of course, edtech companies identified user engagement as their next big problem: How do you design a product that is fun enough that students will choose to play it, while still teaching them something?

And so arose the edutainment industry, which resembles “games, with periodic interruptions for occasional work” much more than it resembles “intellectual activities that are also satisfyingly puzzlelike and interesting.”

It’s not that you can’t do the latter.

My wife and daughter spent this weekend playing through Opus Magnum, an engineering and programming puzzle game. But this isn’t “a game, presented as effectively a bribe for tolerating the occasional math problem.” Instead, it’s “math, which is so fun that people were able to produce it and sell it as a game.”

The failure state of edtech is one in which the game is just a bribe. Students spend very little time doing anything educationally valuable, and even as a bribe, the game is probably not optimal. I think it would be a lot more effective to just give your kid an old-fashioned worksheet and then say “When you’re done, you can play video games all evening.” Then, they would pick whatever game they like most and probably both do more math and have more fun.

More broadly, I am, in fact, a defender of gamifying education, in many contexts.

Defenders of drill in education love to point out (correctly) that you do a lot of drill in basketball practice, but you also play a lot of basketball games, and no one would get good at basketball without the games to look forward to.

If you’re looking for games where kids will actually learn something, board games where dice get rolled are good arithmetic practice, and board games that require negotiation and planning are a good way to build those skills.

Our kids play a game at school called Wits and Wagers where you bet on the answer to trivia questions, and it has observably helped build both math and history knowledge.

Video games tend to be worse for math because they do the computation for you, but they can be fantastic for history. Everyone I know who can name most of the political divisions of Charlemagne’s Europe got there by playing Crusader Kings, not by taking a history class (and if you do take a history class, you’ll be advantaged by the familiarity).

After talking to a bunch of people about where they learned the basics of geography and hearing the answer Risk with an embarrassed laugh a few too many times, I bought Risk; my children, too, will know where Kamchatka is after waging a few pitched battles there.

But, yet again, those are games, designed to be appealing to people playing in their free time, which happen to have a lot of content knowledge in them; they’re not “bribes” within an education app for doing the educational content.

The latter approach I’m much more inclined to call doomed.

Making good games is hard, so these offerings will rarely be spectacularly good as games. And they generally presume that students need a bribe very frequently, so they don’t get a lot of sustained practice. They want the basic scaffold of “content plus game” to work for users at many different levels, so the game content cannot be meaningfully related to the educational content. And this sort of setup can never, ever teach “sustained focus on something that looks hard at first glance,” which is one of the most valuable muscles to help children exercise.

I don’t think of myself as anti-screen, but I can only see this backlash as a positive development. The default outcome of issuing personal devices in school is students playing meaningless games or watching whatever the YouTube algorithm shows them; the default trajectory of edtech games is to become edutainment. These things can be good, but we observably do not, by default, get the good versions.

Just give kids a worksheet and tell them that when they’re done, they can go play. They’ll do more work and have more fun.

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