If DragonBox is any indication, he's on the right path so far. So he started up a company called We Want to Know, aimed at creating some user-friendly educational games that are (1) really educational and (2) really games. He wanted his kids to learn algebra in a way that made sense to them, and with tablets and gamification of education he thought that there must be some way to create an app that would make algebra easier to learn. Jean-Baptiste Huynh is a Vietnamese Frenchman living in Norway, who taught math for several years and was frustrated with the way math is taught in schools. When I showed it to them and saw how easily they picked it up, I was blown away. It really hadn't occurred to me at all that I could teach beginning algebra to my third-grader, let alone my five-year-old. But I know it's something that a lot of students have trouble with - and certainly not something that is usually taught before middle school, sometimes not until high school. I've always been good at math myself and algebra was always one of my favorites. When I first started playing with DragonBox to see how it worked, I was amazed at how simple it was. You also get another star if you have the right number of cards at the end - that is, you've simplified the equation as much as possible. and then finally you get something like that screenshot near the top of the post, where the trays have faded out completely and there are just the hint of card outlines, and - voila! - you're solving algebraic equations.Īside from isolating the box, you're also challenged to complete the level in as few moves as possible, which gets you a an extra star. Once you get to World 3, the cards are no longer scattered willy-nilly in the two trays, but are arranged in a line, with plus signs between them and an equals sign between the two trays.Īnd then the cards once again turn into numbers and letters instead of little pictures. So you isolate the "x." Sometimes instead of weird little creatures there are letters on the cards like "c" or "b" and sometimes there are things that look like dice, white squares with some number of dots on them. Sometimes there's no box, but there is a little white square with an "x" on it, and it's sparkling. These, of course, are fractions - multiplication and division - but you don't need to know that to play the game, either. And you'll learn that a one-dot vanishes when you drag it onto a card it's attached to (with a little grey dot between them). (This, of course, simulates adding the same number to both sides.) And then, a few levels on, you learn that you can flip these extra cards from day to night (and vice versa) before dragging them onto the trays.Īs the game progresses, you'll start seeing cards that are above and below each other, with a bar in the middle - and you'll learn to cancel these out by dragging one onto the other, which then turns into a one-dot. Then, you'll start to get some "night" versions of cards - drag these onto the "day" versions and they become green swirls, which you already know how to handle.Īfter you've gotten past several levels of moving cards around and tapping on swirls, you'll get a few cards down at the bottom which you can drag onto the trays - but whenever you drag a card onto one side, you have to also drag a copy to the other side as well. At first you do this simply by tapping the green spirally cards, which vanish when you tap them. The app gives very minimal instructions in a hand-written font with arrows pointing to relevant spots on the screen, but it tells you to get the box by itself. Somewhere on the screen there will be a little box with a star on it, sparkling and glowing. You are presented with a big screen with two trays, each containing a number of "cards" with different images on it. (They aren't all typical dragons - One starts off more like a fish, one looks like a squid, and so on.) I was told that the dragons were all drawn by a fourteen-year-old girl, and they're a lot of fun. It's a very tiny incentive (along with earning stars) but they really want to beat the next level to watch the dragon grow into its next form. While this in itself has nothing to do with algebra, I mention this because my kids love this. There are five "worlds," each with twenty levels, and as you progress through the levels the "dragons" hatch and grow into their full-sized versions. First, a bit about how DragonBox actually works.
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