Dragonbox

I just finished playing twenty or so minutes of Dragonbox as I was instructed to on this weeks learning path.

Just opening the game presented a few ICT challenges for me. Firstly I discovered that I needed to enable plugins to run it, which I did but after still not being able to get the game running in Chrome, I switched to IE and it worked fine…a small troubleshooting test – and I passed (yay for me!).

The Dragonbox game was presented to us as an example of an innovative way to utilize ICTs in the classroom, by teaching algebra through a fun game. I’ll be honest and say that I did not make the link between the activities in the games and the concepts they were trying to teach until, after playing the game for a while (and becoming frustrated at one of the latest ‘rules’ that I couldn’t understand), I read the pedagogy link. Here, the makers of the game explain how each new phase of the game is associated with a algebraic rule. Finally, it all began to make sense!

I didn’t have any difficulties with algebra in school personally, I actually quite enjoyed it, and I think I would prefer to learn it the old fashioned way that  I was taught it (perhaps this could be put down to the schema I have for my own learning) but I can see the value in this game for a few reasons.

It is fun and addictive – no problems in motivating the kids to practice it!

It isn’t obvious that it is related to algebra – students that don’t consider themselves good at mathematics won’t bring a negative ‘I can’t do this’ attitude to lessons.

And when the concepts are applied in actual algebra, the teacher can reassure students that they have already mastered the concepts through the game, and thinking about the game should assist in consolidating understanding.

Perhaps the most important piece of knowledge that I can take away from my experience playing this game is the importance of teacher support. Where I ended my session in the game, I was completely lost as to how to progress to the next problem. Left unsupervised, I imagine a student in that position would become very frustrated, and give up. And possibly not feel particularly good about playing the game again. Since the game didn’t include some sort of emergency ‘help’ feature, the teacher would need to be on hand to offer assistance when required.