Funbrain.com via Elementary Educators

I’ve worked as a computer support technician at a handful of elementary schools in the Cajon Valley Union School District; each school has a teacher designated as the Site Lead Technology Teacher, whose responsibility it is to help deal with technology issues on campus, including computer problems and, to a somewhat lesser extent, to attempt to help other site teachers incorporate technology into the curriculum.

Many of these teachers have done a good first pass over the net to locate decent sites for educational games and development of lesson plans. One site for educational software games that they virtually all point to is Funbrain. It seemed like a good idea to go to this site and see if it’s game software warranted all of the attention.

As it turns out, it really doesn’t. Virtually all of the games are of the ‘drill & kill’ variety (aka drill & practice, considered by most research to be the least effective type of educational software). Instructions on how to play the game are minimal, and always in text, never vocalized and/or animated via a PDA. As a result, for early elementary learners (K-2 or so), a teacher would have to mentor each student through the initial stages of each game.

I was mostly interested in games that worked on 1st and 2nd grade vocabulary. The available vocabulary games on funbrain are minimal; most of the games are mathematical in nature. There are far fewer in other lesson areas, such as history, science or language arts. I navigated through a few of the language arts and math games, and they all followed pretty much the same path. Given a small set of instructions, the player attempted to answer questions correctly. After each answer was submitted, the student was informed visually whether they answered right or wrong. The number of questions they answered correctly and incorrectly was recorded at the top of the browser window.

The problem had to do with the nature of the lesson design and the usability of the system. No lessons incorporated anything but rudimentary coaching (In the form of ‘pointers’ on where the student might be going wrong, or what they might focus on for optimal improvement). Of the little coaching that there was, all of it was textual in nature, never animated or via audio output. This seemed like a typical case where a conventional drill & kill paper and pencil lesson was dumped verbatim into a software game, instead of development of an alternative approach that made use of the inherent tools within the medium. From a usability standpoint, displays of questions and responses and scores were inconsistent between windows within a lesson, and between lessons within each area.

Overall, I found funbrain.com to be a poor website and a poor site name; it wasn’t very much fun, and I don’t believe that it will do much to stimulate a student’s brain.