Comments on: Why a Little Help Can Go a Wrong Way

By: Tracy H

Tracy H — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 23:36:24 +0000

Hi Jeff – You have a terrific handle on how to best support your child. You’re giving him responsibility for his learning and you are providing validation and reinforcement when it seems most important. Thank you for your question, it will help other parents provide the best type of support to their children on DreamBox!

By: Jeff C.

Jeff C. — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 20:44:16 +0000

My son definitely likes me to watch him play Dreambox. But, when he asks for help with an answer I suggest he try to figure it out on his own. I don’t give hints. I used to, but I stopped. However, after he answers a question, whether it’s right or wrong, I might make a comment. e.g. I see that you counted each and every dot to get to 13. Do you see that there are two rows of 5 red dots, that’s 10. Then, there are 3 white dots.. so that’s 10, 11, 12, 13.
I only do this after he’s tried to answer himself. And, only infrequently. Is this kind of coaching/teaching within your “methodology?”

By: Leigh

Leigh — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 15:37:18 +0000

Hi Melanie, it was great talking to you the other day! As you may remember, this was easily fixed. Just contact DreamBox Customer Support, either by calling us at 1-877-451-7845 between 8am and 5pm Pacific, or by e-mailing us at support@dreambox.com. We are always happy to reset your child’s curriculum to a more appropriate level.

By: Melanie H.

Melanie H. — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 18:54:20 +0000

I was wondering if this happened accidentally (think 13 year old son having a blast “playing with 6 1/2 year old son) and now it is LEVELS beyond what my 6 1/2 year old can do. Is there a way to fix this?

By: Robert

Robert — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 05:27:17 +0000

While your explanation makes sense from an algorithmic perspective, the reality is that kids want parents to help. Asking open ended questions only goes so far when kids are simply not familiar with a game or the objects used to depict the task are not familiar.

Also, in my child’s case her math capability far exceeds her fine motor skills. So she finds the interfaces for some games really difficult (not to mention we’re using my Mac which has a mouse suited for my fat hands, not her dainty fingers). That said, she gleefully exclaims “dad, move the 3 beads next to the 5 beads and that makes 8 which is 1 bead less than the 9 we just had”. So to me it seems that the UI must adapt to kids who have the concepts ok, but lack the dexterity to express that “in silico”.

And in general, parents need to be the primary mentor — the game shouldn’t try to be the authority, regardless of how sophisticated its neural net back-propagation. So it should facilitate (even encourage) parental guidance (vs. direct parent answers which of course is counterproductive.)

Perhaps you should treat this as a feature opportunity — suggest questions to parents when the child is struggling. For example, many of your games simply repeat the instructions over and over if the child is taking time to respond. Why not detect the delay and prompt parents with appropriate questions? Then parents are learning how to guide their child appropriately!

In summary, while I think the learning algorithms are geeky cool, the reality is that parents need to learn how to teach their kids more than we need an impressive Bayesian classifier. Change the learning algorithm —- not the parent role as lifelong math mentor. Let it adapt to parental guidance (even alert us if it suspects we are being over zealous)…”Hey Dad, Junior’s last 5 answers have been 100% correct and really fast…are we helping too much??”