Research suggests that using virtual manipulatives can help students develop a richer understanding of concepts, even more than using physical tools, and can be particularly useful for students with language difficulties. (Read the DreamBox blog on using virtual manipulatives to teach early numeracy.)

The DreamBox open number line tool

Open Number Line: Developing Number Sense™
The interactive open number line is the most recent DreamBox Teacher Tool we’re offering to teachers for free! Teachers can use the open number line virtual manipulative within a variety of instructional contexts.

With it, you can support the development of number sense and computational fluency. For example:

• Envision numbers as the magnitude of distances on a line, as equivalent quantities, and by their proximity to landmark numbers.
• Explore operations (addition, subtraction, etc.) to support the development of various efficient strategies for computational fluency.

Since it is not attached to a specific type of problem, teachers can use it to solve a range of problems and represent students’ strategies. The virtual open number line can be used to explore mathematical ideas including counting, skip counting, addition and subtraction, and modeling situations.

For ideas on using DreamBox Learning’s open number line tool with stand-alone activities or as a supplement to an existing math curriculum, visit www.dreambox.com/teachertools/open_number_line. DreamBox also provides resources to support the professional development of teachers as they learn to incorporate the virtual manipulatives in the classroom: tutorials and suggestions for using the tools in lessons.

We included the Mouse Tutorial games as a part of the First Time User Experience (FTUE). It’s a part of the opening game story. Users must pass the minimum (bare minimum) requirements for each level in order to enter DreamBox and begin the instructional math games. This ensures that most users have the basic mouse skills needed to use our virtual manipulatives. (Note: Our virtual manipulatives are vital to allowing students to “build” answers to problems instead of simply providing multiple answer choices for them to choose from.)

Math learning requires mouse education for younger students

What’s the problem? The problem is that we built this into the FTUE. Some kids love it! Some kids don’t! In the same way that the first page of a book and the first 10 minutes of a movie are important for hooking the reader or viewer, so are the first 10 minutes of a computer game experience. There are lots of solutions to this problem, and each is accompanied with varying degrees of development time. The most straight forward solution is, if can we generalize, that all kids that start at the kindergarten level receive the mouse tutorials. Anyone older doesn’t. The most involved approach, requiring the biggest commitment in terms of development, would be to create a mouse skills assessment at the beginning of the experience, just as we’ve included academic assessments throughout the math games. As with every decision we’ve made at DreamBox, we carefully weigh the pros and cons of each, ultimately leading us to a better experience for every child.

Harness the power of the internet for math learning and education

This is only made possible through the intelligent, rapid, and sophisticated technologies that energize these leading websites and their related services. So it amazes me that none of this transformative horsepower has been used in any meaningful way to educate children. Instead, we largely teach students the same way we have for a century, with large classes, lectures, and textbooks. And our use of technology in schools is reserved for improved whiteboards, automated practice, or distance learning. DreamBox Learning aims to change this: we are building a new software platform for education so that children can enjoy an individually-tailored, world class learning experience over the Web both at home and in school.

“All students learn in different ways, and in the book, we use the theory of multiple intelligences to describe this,” explains Horn. “Considering these differences and constraints on time and space for learning, it’s incredibly hard to individualize instruction for 20 or 30 students at a time. So our big question was: how do you break apart that interdependency and allow for truly student-centered learning?’ Horn calls for educators to be more purposeful in their use of technology in the classroom and discusses the new role of the teacher in a disrupted classroom.”

Michael Horn is co-author of “Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns.”

As you can imagine, this variance made a big difference in user satisfaction with our lessons and games. We searched for an existing tool to help young students develop these skills. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find any high-quality, free mouse tutorials that were geared toward this age group. (This was 1-½ years ago.) Most were for grown-ups. What to do?

DreamBox Learning Confronts Mouse Coordination for Kindergarten to Second Grade Kids:

We approached this as we would any other set of curricula. We thought about the steps needed to build the skill and set about designing activities that matched this. The result: our Mouse Midway games. Kids first encounter the balloon popping game. This simply requires moving the mouse over the balloon to pop it. Second they play the bowling pin game, where users must click on each bowling pin. Third is the turtle drag and drop game. Users must click and hold the turtle, then drag it to the water and release it. Each game requires a slightly more difficult skill than the one before it. And each has a timer so kids can see how many balloons they can pop, or how many turtles they can drop, before the time’s up. The more they play, the more their skills improve.

Because it’s important that users have adequate mouse abilities, these games can be played as part of DreamBox at anytime by going to the Carnival and then to the Arcade. They’re a lot of fun for kids and adults. Go ahead, challenge your child! See who earns the highest score. If appropriate, give yourself a handicap by using your inferior hand.

Making A DreamBox Math Game That Kids Can Really Use

I’ll never forget the day we realized our users didn’t “see” the differences in their game maps. How could they? We’d show them a map with some circular icons glowing, and they would choose one to play. The next time they saw their map, some of the icons were the same and some were different. A check mark indicating a game was successfully played was ignored. We needed to do a better job of telling the student, “Yay! You passed this game. Here are some new games to play.” The next time your child plays DreamBox, watch the map in the Adventure Park closely. When you return to a map, changes take place in front of the user. Lesson icons appear and disappear. Check marks appear. Reward backpacks fall onto the screen. When kids see their progress, it’s more meaningful and engaging. Whew! A minor tweak with huge results.

Did we learn our lesson the first time? No! Unfortunately, we repeated this mistake in the Carnival. But rest assured we are currently working to correct this behavior!

Yesterday we introduced the DreamBox Math Classroom program, which allows pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, first and second grade teachers to use DreamBox in their classrooms. As part of our commitment to supporting teachers and making excellent math education accessible to all children, DreamBox is offering any pre-K to 2nd grade teacher at a public, private, or independent school free use of DreamBox K-2 Math in school through the end of this school year (June 30, 2009).

In the past two days we have had over 150 new teachers sign up on DreamBox and create classroom subscriptions adding over 1000 students! Teachers are finding that DreamBox is an incredibly effective way to teach 4-8 year olds math in a fun way.

Why DreamBox is the Online Math Learning Game for Your Child!

Our amazing team worked hard to create a classroom version of DreamBox Learning K-2 Math, because the game allows every kindergarten, first, and second grade student to progress through hundreds of online math lesson games at their own pace! When they begin to play, each child is assessed and started at just the right place in the curriculum, and gets different lessons, hints, level of difficulty, and much more. Teachers have an online Teacher Dashboard where he or she can view individual student progress and completed lessons in the DreamBox math curriculum.

Every teacher is given a personal internet address for their classroom that they can pull up on school computers and have up to 32 students in their class playing DreamBox math games at the same time. Teachers are also able to play sample kindergarten, first grade and second grade math lessons with their classrooms by bringing them up on any interactive white board.

And teachers can invite parents to try DreamBox at home so students can play DreamBox and learn serious math after school, on weekends and over the summer, in addition to the time spent at school, and have one record of their academic progress and game play.

If you know a teacher who would like to use DreamBox in their classroom, please tell them about the free DreamBox Math Classroom subscription! Teachers can sign up for a DreamBox teacher account, preview and evaluate our curriculum, and apply for a free classroom subscription, good through June 30, 2009, at www.dreambox.com/teachers.

Looking for more depth I wandered around his blog, where he explores the misunderstanding about the role games play in the educational process. There’s a lot of great insight here! He describes games not so much as programs “with content that must be delivered but rather as spaces for exploration, experimentation, and problem solving.” In other words, learning games aren’t just textbooks in a different form. They are so much more powerful because they can harness the active participation, exploration, and self-directed learning inherent in game play.

“The learning which games foster… is “undisciplined” in the best sense of the world—the child is encouraged to pursue their interests where-ever they lead without regard to the way schools divide up content or time.” For parents who care about fostering a lifelong love of learning, this is a powerful way to look at how to look at online learning games and their children’s “screen time”.

You can read more from Henry Jenkins on his blog.

As Buckleitner talks, he tells stories. Stories about toys that talk, even when one isn’t playing with them. Have you ever been eating dinner and heard some toy on the ground start singing a song? The toy is shouting, “Play with me.” He talked about kids wanting control of the game and their need to think as they play. Often toys interrupt kids’ thinking, which interferes with their ability to continue their own creativity and growth. This made so much sense. And we had made this mistake in our earliest version of the product!

DreamBox Online Learning: The Nuts and Bolts of our Math Education Software

Luckily, we only had 40 math games built. We went back to each one and dramatically changed our use of audio instruction. We replaced the long, explicit directions before each game with a simple introduction, often  a single line of audio. We implemented a Help button. If kids want more instruction, they’ll ask for it.

Click on Help once and you’ll hear quick, simple one- or two- sentence directions. Click on Help twice and you’ll receive more explicit how-to directions. Are you finished with the directions or other audio hints? The help button often becomes a Skip button. Press Skip and the audio stops. Tired of the background music? Turn it off by clicking on the little speaker in the top right corner of the screen. Basically, we empower our young users to choose how much noise they want while playing our online math learning game.

Another surprise: many parents prefer the old way! They want to be told exactly how to complete a game, with a sample problem and all. Ultimately, we deferred to the kids. (Shhh. Hey parents — click Help twice and you’ll still get the explicit directions!)

Instead, did I spend the first weeks of school assessing these particular objectives to determine the appropriate starting point for each student? Ideally, yes. But what teacher has of time? Remember, I can spend as much time planning and preparing for my students as I want, but it’s much more difficult to increase the actual instruction time I have with them. Instruction time is a valuable commodity and it’s important to use it wisely. Assessment is an important part of using instruction time wisely, but how much time should I spend assessing supplementary software?

Using Software to Better Gauge Kindergarten through Second Grade Math Curriculums

Although I hate to admit this, I’d usually make my best guess for a starting place. Reflecting back on this, I’d usually include too many objectives which didn’t challenge the students early enough, and resulted in my students not wanting to use the software. Or maybe the software just wasn’t engaging enough.

This prior experience had a dramatic impact on DreamBox Learning K-2 Math. I didn’t want to burden teachers and parents with this same requirement. We (teachers, developers and our wonderful assessment advisor) spent hours developing an assessment model that allows our software to dynamically adjust and provide just the right curriculum for each individual. As a result there are over a million paths through our curriculum. While I can’t tell you exactly how we do this (it’s part of our secret sauce!), I can tell you this is ground-breaking work. We’ve built something I haven’t seen any other product emulate. And to have my name associated with the patent — well, that’s just too cool!

His comments highlight one of our big challenges at DreamBox communicating how different DreamBox is from other products people are familiar with and this seems like a good forum to discuss it! Because we offer a web service instead of a CD or software that downloads to your desktop, DreamBox is able to customize every aspect of the experience to your child’s specific actions in the game and learning needs.

A Math Game that Adapts Dynamically

A CD starts every child at the same point, and they all work through the same lessons in the same sequence, progressing to the next level if they’ve passed them all some children will be successful with this model while others will quickly become either overwhelmed or bored. By contrast, DreamBox places children in the curriculum so they skip the material they already know, begins them where they’re ready to learn, and constantly adjusts everything from the hints and instructional feedback, the pacing and sequence, level of difficulty and more. So each child is always challenged at just the right level, it holds their interest and they can go much further.

Furthermore, learning doesn’t happen in a linear way, and kids really benefit from the opportunity to explore and learn with more self-directed freedom than the typical school curriculum allows. So kids may be in several different parts of the curriculum concurrently and in fact most kids will be learning material from more than 1 grade at any given time. They may be ahead in number sense but still practicing in the computation area of the curriculum. And parents can see this as they follow  what their children are learning in the parent dashboard and through the progress report emails that we send.

So it really is highly individualized learning our customers are buying, a service, not simply a static set of lessons or a piece of software!

However, like Vitamin A, a lot more is not better. To take an extreme, a child playing 3 hours a day every day is crowding out too many other activities for a happy child.

So what is the “right” amount of time for your child? And more importantly, given that the answer varies from child to child, and even week to week for the same child, how do you tell when your child has had the right amount of time? What advice do you have for other parents on scheduling time for DreamBox play?

That’s when she said it. “Individualized?! That’s what they all say!”

You can’t really blame her. Lots of companies (past and present) state that they offer individualized instruction through adaptations. But it’s not entirely clear that they are offering individualization in the most rigorous interpretation of the word. Put another way, the concept of individualization encompasses a lot of territory, from the slightest customization to a highly personalized experience. Add to this the fact that individualization is a hard thing to see and experience firsthand (especially with a single student playing), and you can understand her perspective.

Individualized Math Learning Paths

When most eLearning companies claim individualization, what they usually mean is that they have fixed lesson pathways, simple “right or wrong” scoring of answers, basic audio/visual hints, and preset questions. In the end, however, it’s all very linear and predetermined much like an interstate highway. When we talk about individualization, it means we dynamically adapt lessons, hints, difficulty, lesson pathways, pace, motivational elements, and more. That means our product is non-linear and flexible much like, say, space travel. Here’s another easy way to visualize all of this – it’s an example of how we handle lesson pathways (aka “sequencing”) for students:

Lesson Pathways: DreamBox vs. Competition

As you can see, most companies merely advance a student to the next lesson group whether they struggled or got there with ease. This generally means that all children advance the same way and usually in the same manner. DreamBox, on the other hand, provides many ways to traverse the lessons including offering the student a range of choices within a particular lesson group (i.e., you’ll note all the #3 choices).

Why are we able to do so much? The simple answer is that our team understands and is able to harness the full sophistication and complexity of the Web — such that we can analyze everything from clickstreams to session information. This means we have more tools at our disposal, which in turn allows us to take a more refined approach to adaptations. When you couple this with our intense desire to test what we’ve built again and again, it means that we can deliver a truly individualized experience, which is at the heart of effective learning.

I’ve written in this blog before about my own math education – although my father was an engineer I didn’t do well in math in school, and there have been times I’ve struggled to help my son with math homework because I had to first figure out the way it was being taught. It took me longer to see that math is problem solving, and to believe that I could be good at it.

So I wanted to pass along a link to a site, published by a math teacher named Mark Karadimos, called MathGuide—and in particular the page on “Why Must I Learn Math?” For parents who bring the same kind of baggage to the subject that I do, this is a very educational read. Because today, it’s not just the traditional math and science careers that require mathematics—not just astronauts and scientists and engineers—every profession needs math.

Kids Need to Build Math Skills for All Professions

I’m more aware of this than ever because I’m working on a short documentary-style video for DreamBox where we interviewed more than 50 children, asking them what they want to be when they grow up. As part of this project I’ve been researching how an amazing range of careers—from beauticians to farmers to paleontologists, rock stars, and zoologists—all need math in their jobs!

And if you still have any doubt about why it’s important to overcome our own negative math education experiences, read the National Math Panel report to learn more about the importance of math in terms of access to college, career choices, and earning potential! You’ll find it, along with other parent resources, at the U.S. Dept. of Education site.

The products that rarely caught on were hardly entertaining and somewhat educational. The ones that got traction were decently entertaining but barely educational. Initially, parents felt good about the edu-speak they were hearing and seeing in an entertaining product. But as time went on, parents got wise to the fact that these same products had defaulted to a basic model of practice-based lessons, rather than differentiating themselves with real instruction that leads to effective learning. Consequently, parents and children didn’t know what to make of edu-tainment software, so they started to lump it together with pure entertainment software, to which edu-tainment didn’t hold a candle.

Edu-tainment is Subsumed into Entertainment

Caught in the sloppy middle, edu-tainment companies either died or began to refocus their efforts toward more entertainment and even less education (if at all) under the theory that twitchy eye candy makes for an easier attractant. One only has to look at recent strategic shifts in products and corresponding messaging from the likes of JumpStart World to see this. This means that edu-tainment, like analog, is dead, but not before leaving behind a noisy marketplace full of confusion, an underserved generation of customers, and misleading promises (e.g., please don’t get me started on how the words “individualized” and “adapted” have been debased!).

Individualized eLearning is Born

It has also left a white space of opportunity. In addition to timing (for more on this, please see my blog on “DreamBox: eLearning Comes Home”), the promising news is that the current, web-savvier generation of parents still wants effective educational products that are engaging. Thankfully, they are also starting to see the beginnings of a better-segmented marketplace on the web, the results of which I believe are starting to shakeout as follows.

Market Shakeout of Edu-tainment and Individualized eLearning

If correct,

• Edu-tainment will be engulfed by Web-based Entertainment;
• eLearning will be replaced with the more potent Individualized eLearning;
• Virtual Schools will grow to serve students that otherwise lack access;
• eTutoring will dwindle over time as Individualized eLearning and Virtual Schools render them unnecessary;
• eTextbooks will creep forward incrementally as the digital textbook counterpart to the entrenched paper version of itself.