"You don’t feel like 'I'm finished' but 'I want to learn more,'" says Zoran Popovic, the Director of the University of Washington Center for Game Science. He is talking, of course, about math.
Right now, hundreds of Android tablets are stashed in rollaway closets spread over fourteen sixth grade math classrooms in five Seattle and Federal Way schools. These tablets are running a new kind of educational software dubbed Enlearn, built by a non-profit of the same name that the 46-year-old University of Washington professor founded in December 2012.
This relatively large ten-week trial is a follow-up to a five-day trial they conducted last spring, where teachers presented a short math curriculum twice: once with classic paper materials, and once with Enlearn.
The overall result may seem modest. A 2.5 percent increase in collective scores on exercise problems doesn't sound big. More important, though, is what that figure doesn't illustrate: During the trial, some students in the paper-based classroom were clearly falling behind.
The classroom powered by Enlearn had no such edge cases. At the end of the trial, every student had a firm grasp of the math concepts covered by the Enlearn curriculum. And that's after only five days of use.
Enlearn is playing in a busy playground. Enthusiasts and technologists have been heralding the digital revolution of the classroom for years. Bellevue-based DreamBox Learning has been building and testing individualized learning software since 2006, and they're hardly the only ones looking to digitize education. Yet the future is slow to catch on in the classroom.
