Students Are Motivated By Scores

Do games work?

My brother’s kids had been using Mathchops for a few months, so I asked him what he’d noticed. Sometimes, family and friends are hesitant to tell you something bad about a project you’ve spent thousands of hours working on. They don’t want to hurt your feelings. My brother doesn’t have this problem: “I’ll tell you one thing about Mathchops – it’s not fun.” 

This was not what I was hoping to hear.

When Jon, Matt, and I set out to build our first version of Mathchops, we were very excited about the potential of games. What if we could make a game that was just as engaging as Fortnite or Call of Duty, but you actually learned math in the process? We made games like Break the Bank (my favorite – it asks you to bet each time you answer a question), Diamond Dash (like Jeopardy, but with a timer), and Question Race (multiplayer!). We dreamed that kids would play these games for hours and hours.

We haven’t given up on this dream, but here is a reality that can’t be ignored: most high school students only care about scores. Not avatars, not personal bests, not coins – scores. They want to see that 610 turn into a 770. 

My brother elaborated (and here I’m paraphrasing): “Mathchops does help them. They do get better. But I have to tell them to do it. And it definitely feels like work. Mathchops is not fun fun. If they want to have fun, they’ll go to a movie or hang out with their friends.”

As soon as he said it, I realized it was true – kids care about scores. They do the work because they want the scores. Why would any math program be as fun as hanging out with your friends? But later on, I realized there was another aspect to this: kids care about scores. If you can show that their work directly correlates to higher scores, they will do it.

These realizations have led to some changes:

1) All of the main games on Mathchops are tied to accurate score predictions. Predict Your Score, the Level Challenge, and Category Challenges all reward students with a score at the end of the game. They are the three most popular games by a very wide margin (over 85% of all games played).

2) We now emphasize the importance of the tutor’s role in Mathchops. Mathchops needs to be assigned and checked on every week. The good news is, you don’t have to do very much beyond that. You may only spend 5 minutes per week on a student’s Mathchops work, but if you spend it correctly, you’ll motivate the student to answer hundreds of questions. 

3) I don’t introduce Mathchops as a fun way to practice. I introduce it as a tool that will help them earn much higher scores.

Those kids of my brother’s have aged out of test prep now. They never thought Mathchops was fun, and I don’t think they ever touched the games after taking the SAT. But they all answered over 1000 questions on Mathchops, and they all exceeded their initial math goals.

Many other students have had the same experience – they do more work and improve more than expected. So my takeaway is not so much that games are a dead end. It’s true that kids will never do much work just because you call something a game. But if you connect the game directly to their goals (in our case, with score predictions), and they see that their work in the game leads to results in the real world, they will definitely do much more work than they would have outside of a game.