Use Case: How to Introduce Your Class to Prodigy
Signed up for Prodigy, but aren’t familiar enough with it to know why and how to get your class started?
You’re not the only one. Although many teachers register -- often due to word-of-mouth or an ad -- they’re too busy to look further into the curriculum-aligned math video game.
To understand Prodigy’s benefits and seamlessly deliver them to your students, follow these steps:
Familiarize Yourself with Prodigy’s Capabilities
Prodigy’s capabilities -- and the benefits they deliver -- show why more than one million teachers use the game in their classrooms.
Here are a few:
- Student Engagement
“Many students are excited about solving problems so they can advance in the game. They’ve done far more practice of math skills than I could have foreseen,” says David Keech -- a 7th and 8th grade math teacher at Wisconsin Rapids Public Schools.
Prodigy makes math engaging by borrowing elements from role-playing games (RPGs), such as Pokémon. Students create an avatar and use their powers to face monsters and other players in duels, answering problems to win.
“Students encourage others to participate. And then they work outside of school so they can compete, all the while reviewing more and more math skills and concepts,” adds Keech.
- Comprehensive Reports
With a click of your mouse, you can see specific questions that students correctly and incorrectly answered to learn the exact issues they have.
Reports also record student progress in terms of skills mastered, curriculum coverage and in-school and at-home play time.
Based on a diagnostic assessment, Prodigy automatically delivers problems through a range of content.
As well as numbers, problems are composed of words, images, graphs and pictographs. Students can access in-game manipulatives such as shapes, calculators, counting coins and more. Plus, you can differentiate the difficulty of questions on a student-by-student basis.
Prodigy gives immediate feedback and tailors it the specific mistakes a student made, pointing out the issue and hinting how to resolve it.
You can get a first-hand look at Prodigy’s capabilities by logging into your account:
Determine How Students Will Play
With a better idea of why you should use Prodigy, you must determine how you want students to play.
Depending on your teaching style and classroom environment, try using Prodigy for:
- Learning Stations -- Prodigy can serve as a learning station in classrooms without one-to-one device use, giving each student a chance to play. Set the devices up at one station, having each student log in and automatically receive content that’s tailored to their needs.
- Entry and Exit Tickets -- Previewing or reinforcing the day’s lesson, many teachers in classrooms with one-to-one device use have their students log into Prodigy for the first or last 10 minutes of class. It starts by making a Plan, which takes less than a minute. When logged in and on the Planner page, select Create Plan. In a few clicks, you can schedule topics and specific skills to cover through in-game questions.
- Homework -- By using the Assignment feature, students can receive custom questions to complete at home. It just takes a few quick steps on your end. Log in and select the Planner tool at the left of your screen. Then, click Create Assignment to choose questions based on skill and difficulty, serving them to specific students or your entire class.
- Intervention or Advancement -- As Prodigy automatically determines a student’s trouble spots and abilities through a diagnostic test, the game will deliver content to build prerequisite skills or introduce advanced concepts. When you make a Plan, you’ll override this feature and can deliver your own questions that focus on previous or future curriculum material. This way, students will review old skills or practice new ones at your discretion.
Although teachers use Prodigy in different ways for different purposes, they each engage students and, in the process, help them get better at math.
Wrapping Up
Knowing why and how to introduce your students to Prodigy, you can look forward to a more engaging math class.
With that, you can expect improved skills and increased confidence.
Create or log into your teacher account on Prodigy -- a fun and engaging adaptive math game that adjusts content to accommodate player trouble spots and learning speeds. Curriculum-aligned, it’s used by more than 2.5 million teachers and 100 million students.
