Prodigy
is a mathematic game for children between Grade 1 and Grade 8. It has a good
pool of math questions and topics for students reviewing a math subject at
school as exercises while playing at the same time.
The
web site is www.prodigygame.com. It is
a free math game for all parents and students. Paying an annual fee of C$67.66 would give users access to more game options and prizes.
2.
Major issues
The
major problem of Prodigy game is with its automatic assessment or placement
test of a user.
When
a parent placed a child in a Grade, e.g. Grade 7 override, Prodigy would ask
many questions in preceding grades such as grade 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 for a
long period of time. I noticed they asked more than 60 irrelevant questions.
This is a waste of time for a child as he doesn’t have much free time to spend
on stupid subjects, or underestimate intelligence of user.
3.
An example of issue
When
you place a child in a class (they called this override), you would expect your
child to answer questions or to learn math subjects in that grade, i.e. beginning
of a school year. Those questions would help your child to be successful in his
math class. It’d be waste of time for going through tons of useless questions.
Your child doesn’t have many free hours to spend on a game by the way.
4.
Practical placement test
What
are they supposed to do?
When
a parent placed a user in a class, Prodigy should ask around 1-2 questions in
each topic of that grade. Depending on user’s correct answers, Prodigy would
steer followed questions on failed topics. For example,
·
Let say 2 more questions on successful topics to help users
memorizing those math subjects
·
Some questions on prerequisite topics for failed questions. Those
questions could be from a preceding grade.
·
More than 2 questions on failed topics to help students master the
topic.
5.
Get around their placement test
-
Select a grade
-
You could manually create “assignment” (Planner -> Assignment quiz them on
set of skills) and select each topic to include in an assignment, i.e.
selecting topic questions for your child.
This
would force Prodigy to ask relevant questions to your child.
Even
after your child successfully answered all questions in a grade, Prodigy would
prompt questions in lower grades to your child if it took over in automatic
mode, i.e. after selected assignment completed.I thought that Prodigy could pick up the strategy to drill students in appropriate topics based on the result of the initial round of “assignments” as a placement test, but they did not.
6. Simple Strategy
A student could start playing with Prodigy or become its member at any time during a school year, i.e. he could have learnt some topics well in class.
As soon as his teacher or parent selecting a grade for him, system would perform a placement test with strategy described in section #4, i.e. a few questions per topic in the chosen grade. This is to assess the topics hadn’t been covered in class room or hadn't been taught.
After gathering result from automatic placement test, system would prompt relevant questions as described in section #4 in automatic mode.
After a predetermined number of questions per topic, system would perform a placement test for higher grade, if it was not set by his teacher or parent.
In case the parent or teacher manually assigned topics (assignments) for the student to work on. System would recognize those results as a part of an automated placement test, i.e. skipping questions in those assignments in case system was set back to automatic mode OR only asking questions from missing topics.
7. Awards
Kids like to win a game, and this is not a casino. Therefore system should give students more chances to win “hearts” and “stars”. For example, “Chance Wheel Time” should check player’s hearts to give players more hearts (strength) in order to continue a play. This is not a real casino for random or probability algorithms.
Notes:
* January 16, 2019: I have spoken to Prodigy's support staff twice to describe issues and solution, but they showed support of idiot design by developers and some "certified" teachers.
I have QA background. I used to validate products based on its design specification and also its sanity, i.e. its design. I would throw back to developers with a product like this.
The bottom line is "BA,
developers, QA, and support" at Prodigy didn't perform as expected.
* Holding a degree or
certification didn't imply that your work was outstanding.
* How many hours a student could
spend on Prodigy a week? Perhaps 1 hour.
How long does it take to answer a
question? Perhaps 30 sec - 1 minute.
If you set a student to Grade 7,
do you want to see system asking more than 60 questions started grade 1? He
would fail his current official class before completing the placement test by
Prodigy. I turned system to manual after seeing those 60 stupid questions.
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