Motivating Kids to Practice math

I'm always looking around for things to motivate my kids to get better and better on the basic...you know those boring old math facts.  That's not easy to do because there are so many things that compete for the time and attention.

Luckily I went to the NCTM conference in Salt Lake City.  There I ran into a booth that was selling an online version of the Game of 24.  I played this for hours when my children were young and it never ceased to challenge them and kept them asking to play more.  So when I saw the online version, I thought what could be better?

Luckily again, I was able to get a "free" subscription for my math classes to play until the end of the school year.  First in Math is the name of the vender selling this version.  It took me a bit to set up my classes (and I think the user name and passwords are way too clunky)...but then we were off.

Students earn "stickers" for successfully completing different levels of skill sets.  There are bonus games to play and different areas that all practice different skills.  Actually the documentation isn't half bad and pretty clearly explains things.  Although I'll tell you that the kids figured out way faster than I could digest the documentation where and how to accumulate stickers quickly.

Right now my 2nd hour has almost 10,000 stickers after 2 weeks of optional play on your own time and my 1st hour class has about 3,000.  The most obvious thing to do was to setup a competition between the two hours and 4 or 5 kids in 2nd hour took the challenge seriously....they have buried the 1st hour.  I think that might have been discouraging for them UNTIl I helped them see that it was really only the effort of those 4 or 5...and that if they could find 10 that would do half as much...they could be back in it.

So with a renewed commitment to beat 2nd hour they left for the weekend.  We'll see.

What I can tell you is that for some types of kids this is really engaging.  For others, they just don't care.  Like so many things in school...you have to use multiple means to find engagement.  The big question will come when I try to figure out the cost benefit of this....