Dreaming by Numbers: Winning the Education Game

Why did Reed Hastings, CEO of the half-billion-a-year movie-rental behemoth Netflix, buy Bellevue’s DreamBox Learning, which sells an online, self-paced math-teaching game for kids? Before he was a mogul, Hastings was a ninth-grade math teacher trying to figure out how to pace his lessons for students who learned at differing speeds. He thinks DreamBox is the answer to his youthful dreams. He bought DreamBox from cofounders Lou Gray and Ben Slivka for an unknown sum, plus ten million dollars for the company to grow on.

“We are very excited about the sale and the new ten-million-dollar investment,” says DreamBox VP Sarah Daniels. Tens of thousands of children, from kindergartners through third graders, already use DreamBox in every state and internationally. Gloats Daniels, “The potential for growth is huge.”

The need sure is huge. American students are flunking math – even students in impoverished Kazakhstan score higher. Last year, fewer than 40 percent of our fourth and eighth graders were math proficient. And according to a study by University of California education expert Greg Duncan, “The single most important factor in predicting later academic achievement is that children begin school with a mastery of early math and literacy concepts.”

But what’s the best way to achieve math mastery? Giving kids a game that lets them pick a cartoon avatar, then help a pirate hunt for treasure or a pixie color a rainbow, while
each kid’s individual progress is tracked by logarithms similar to Amazon’s shopping-suggestion software?

“Danger!” says Dirk Horton of Wenatchee, who spent eight years teaching in the Bill Gates-funded Hybrid Virtual High School in Cleveland. “Avatars are not people. The thinking that went into these games is quite good, but students need a real person to struggle with as a mentor.” At Hybrid High, kids took instruction both online and in person. “A lot of our technology can capture attention, but it doesn’t build relationships. I worry about kids abandoned to their headphones. Math is thinking outside the box, not dreaming in the box. This is just a fancy set of worksheets that capture attention but don’t necessarily deepen understanding.” Horton says kids “need to grab, feel, touch and play with real things to bridge math and reality.”

“Just because a program is online doesn’t mean it’s good,” Daniels concedes. “Some are really just digitized flash cards, which might help with practice and fluency, but won’t help a student learn a new concept or really understand the underlying ideas. DreamBox is different.” And she insists the game does bridge math and reality via “virtual manipulatives” – a math rack, a number line, different-sized rods. Teachers can see the kids’ work and track every mouse-click pattern. “With this data, teachers are able to quickly see where a particular student might need some extra help.”

Greg Duncan, whose study helped inspire DreamBox’s research, finds the results inspiring – but he wants more data. “I like the adaptive nature of the program,” says Duncan. “It gets you to problems at your own level very quickly. It also provides good feedback to parents and teachers. Ben [Slivka]’s people have done before/after studies that show big gains in math achievement, but he has not yet done the random-assignment study that evaluation geeks like me insist on to be convinced that an intervention is worth it.”

“So,” Duncan concludes, DreamBox remains “promising but unproven.” What nobody’s arguing about is the fact that school math is a problem that urgently needs solving. And if math lessons come wrapped in the bright, yummy fun of a computer game, kids probably won’t be the first ones to complain. •