DreamBox Learning®» Educational software

Schooled by 5-8 Year Olds: STOP TALKING TO ME!

Mickelle — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:21:04 +0000

Soon after we completed our first round of beta testing with our very first version of DreamBox (think 40 games as compared to our current 350+), I attended an incredible conference called Dust or Magic, an annual Children’s New Media Design Institute, organized by Warren Buckleitner, editor of the Children’s Technology Review. Buckleitner has reviewed thousands of children’s technology products in order to accomplish his mission: to help parents, librarians, and teachers find quality interactive media/technology products for children. 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!)

Technology Can “Place” Students in the Curriculum More Efficiently than Parents and Teachers Can

Mickelle — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 15:58:33 +0000

As a teacher I often used software in the classroom. Much of this software relied on me to determine the appropriate starting place in the curriculum. Every year I’d add my class list and determine which objectives I wanted to address for each student. Often I’d do this in August as part of my preparation for the new school year, which means I hadn’t even met the kids. Plus, we all know about the loss of knowledge retention that occurs over the summer. How was I supposed to know what each student did and didn’t need? 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!

Why Can't You Buy a DreamBox Learning CD?

Sue — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 01:10:38 +0000

Recently, a friend of a friend who had reviewed our offering wrote to me and said, "Overall I find the business model of a monthly charge very strange for a children's learning software. Usually one buys a book or a CD/DVD for a one time price and can use it indefinitely. DreamBox's offering basically means that now parents need to pay over and over again if their kids want to revisit lessons or if they are just slow learners. A more appropriate pricing model would be to sell the service per lesson or grade level. That would appeal a lot more to me. Think about it. I have to spend $100 for one year of service and after that I basically lose access to the learning tools unless I continue paying. For $100 each year I get many learning software on CD/DVDs or books and I can keep them forever. That is a very easy decision in my mind."

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!

Edu-tainment as You Know It Is Dead

Lou — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 18:31:06 +0000

Edu-tainment was initially envisioned to be the perfect hybrid between education and entertainment. In the abstract, the idea that educational software could be equally effective and engaging remains a good one. Most edu-tainment companies, however, got the mixture wrong and thus never fully realized this promise. This is because of the natural tension / difficulty that exists in trying to serve both parts of the hybrid well. 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.