Playing computer games as homework?!

A student introduced this website called MangaHigh to us towards the end of last semester.  It has a lot of interesting potentials -- especially the fact that it's sorted by curriculum expectations.

Okay, my post is kind of backwards.  I actually wrote about my reservations first, and then went into talking about what it is.  But I figure that it would be better organized, and a better read, if I begin with the highlights and what I am using (and will be using) it for.

Let me explain the aspects of it.

1. It is completely free to sign up and it is easy to navigate the dashboards and set up your class lists.

2. Crazy amount of motivation.

This website has these games that students can play:

The tangled web, for example

If you put your cursor over the game, you can see the topics that they are aiming at

The tangled web isn't actually one that I assigned, but the idea's the same.  The student motivation for this is immense.  They loved it.  They also love the idea of competing with other schools.  It gives them a sense of individual pride, class pride, and even school pride.

3. You can set up challenges for students to reach.  This is like reaching a specific standard and to see if they have met that expectation.  The results are automatic, and all teacher administrators can navigate and see how their students do.

4. There appears to be practice types of questions that can be used in a different section of the site

These are built like puzzles.  Kind of like angry birds levels, or any puzzle game app puzzles.  Student go through achievements, and a score is accumulated.  I can kind of see using these as homework as well.  As you can see in the picture, it can be filtered by your curriculum expectations (standards in the states).  The example above sorts it according to the Ontario curriculum.  Not every expectation is there, but there are definitely helpful things there.

Ok now that I've provided some positive aspects to the site (because I'm sure there are a lot more features than the ones that I've mentioned), and about using computer games as homework, let me delve into couple of things I've been thinking about.

It has a lot of different types of uses -- but mostly a practice-based website.  I have mixed feelings about some aspects of it

Here are my reservations:

1. Some of the games seem to be practice + process based.  It's not completely a bad thing to have practice (which is probably what I will use it for), but I am afraid that it will pull the focus away from the understanding aspect of it all.

2. It's treating mathematics kind of like a game.  While that has a lot of value and philosophical potential, I am uneasy about students thinking that is the sole purpose of mathematics.

3. I have a lot of interested in producing rich activities, and I wrote about some aspects of it. These games are really just for practice, and so I really need to have some good conversation about opinions surrounding the use of this, before I can comfortable fully endorse it.

4. what do the scores mean?  I am unsure what the high scores mean in terms of student understanding

5. They are doing this at home, and away from what I can help with.  I miss out on some opportunities to see what they are learning and to guide their learning.

It's an interesting site.  I am a big believer that everything can potentially be good, depending on how you use it.  So we'll see how this one goes.