Description: Mangahigh (www.mangahigh.com) is a game-based online learning resource, where students learn Mathematics by purpose-built casual games that balance fun and learning.
Pain Points/ Needs:
- Adaptive Learning
- Common Core Standards
- Game-Based Learning
- Student Assessments
Platforms: iOS, Android, Web, Desktop
Usability: The fusion of computer games and academic subjects provides a compelling and exciting supplement to traditional pedagogy. Mangahigh aims to make the repetitive parts of Math education, like memorization or drills, entertaining through games. It offers hundreds of fun quizzes and games covering the whole Math curriculum for students aged 7-16.
By actively using Mangahigh, students can improve their Math ability by dispelling their fear of Math and being motivated to score better in exams. The games provide powerful contexts that bring out the real-world application of a topic at hand, thereby increasing the students’ interest in the content and encouraging them to explore further. Teachers can set activities for students on games and quizzes mapped to the curriculum and analyze their performance across each activity. It allows them to track student progress without the tedious process of marking notebooks. With instant feedback and continuous access, students don’t have to wait for days to get their work evaluated. Meant as a complement to teachers’ curricula, Mangahigh frees instructors to train students in problem-solving skills instead.
Walkthrough: Teachers can register to create an account which will be a trial account valid for 30 days. It can be upgraded to a premium version as per requirements.
On logging in you will have access to the navigation bar where you will find most of the features you need to teach with Mangahigh; the Dashboard is where you can view the past challenges that you have set your students, the score leaderboard, your school login URL, a link to the Student View, and medal statistics; in Classes you can view all of your classes, access active and past challenges, medals achieved, various student statistics and free play activities; the Activities section allows you to view the Mangahigh curriculum and browse through various games students are playing; the Admin section is where you will manage the classes, student rosters and faculty members and also access the resources section to access support material. A unique ID and password is created for every student you add and students get 24/7 access to their accounts.
Setting a challenge is equivalent to assigning work to your students which can be completed by them at home or at school, either through games, or Prodigi which is a curriculum compliant interactive quiz having a wide range of lessons to choose from. Challenges can be set according to game, course, grade and year and you can play a challenge yourself to ascertain the level and difficulty involved. To introduce a concept for the first time, browse through the Prodigi lessons from the Activities tab, when you find a lesson you wish to try, click on ‘Teach Me Now’ and it will take through examples of how it will be played. Selecting Class from the Classes drop-down allows you to access the analytics for each of your classes. The page lists the medals earned per class, and lets you monitor the Class Challenges, Prodigi Averages, Student Reports and more. In Student Reports you can monitor the progress of individual students against the progress of their class.
Each game covers certain learning topics and is designed to dynamically adapt in difficulty to the ability of the student in order to aid them to stay in their zone of proximal development so that optimal learning takes place. The games also help develop automaticity in learners by giving them a meta-objective that they strive to achieve by repeating a simple step over and over again. Students can also compete with each other and interact with other schools and students online. Mangahigh’s Fai-To bilateral competition league for schools gives teachers an extra tool to drive Math interest and activity.
Price:
- Free for US teachers and schools
- Rs 600 per student per year for a school membership
Our Review: Mangahigh uses the power of video games to bring real Math to life, leading in improvement in students’ engagement, confidence and ability. It uses behaviorist techniques from the social games world to get students interested in Math. The adaptive and personalized approach ensures students build new concepts at an optimized pace and are always working at the leading edge of their learning.
The games develop students’ ability and curiosity to observe, hypothesize, test, evaluate, conclude and refine ideas that are not always possible with traditional pedagogy. Fun games and competitions with schools from around the world motivate students to get online and practice. There is also a badge system where students are awarded for getting a certain score on the activity and can also compare their progress with that of their classmates. Teachers love how easy it is to assign tasks to the students on different games and quizzes mapped to the curriculum. It offers sophisticated problem-solving pedagogy where learners are introduced to new lessons with scaffolding, and then progress towards applied work, supported by specific hints and worked solutions throughout.
It is already in use by over 5000 schools across the US, UK and Australia, and is now available to Indian schools offering CBSE, IGCSE or IB curriculum for classes I to X (April 28th 2014 – www.mangahigh.com/india ).
With Mangahigh your students will be eager to learn more Math and improve their scores. Try it out to make the Math teaching and learning experience fun and more productive.
Don’t forget to share your edtech implementations and practices with the community: http://edtechreview.in/contribute/
Videos and Tutorials: