BrainQuake as a classroom resource
Teachers and students who have been using the Web version of BrainQuake for some time will have grown familiar with the landing page shown above, which leads directly into the video game. That was the product built and tested with a $1.1M award from the US Department of Education after researchers at Stanford University in the US and Tampere University in Finland showed that our initial iOS game Wuzzit Trouble was a highly effective supplementary tool for improving middle-school students’ performance at solving problems, while at the same time having a positive impact on students’ attitude towards math.
(You can see the research papers describing those studies at https://brainquake.com/backed-by-research. We did not write those papers; the university researchers did. We just put them on our website so anyone who was interested in our product could read them without have to go searching the scientific research literature. You will also find a 2018 paper there, written by researchers at the independent, nonprofit education-research organization WestEd, showing that the vastly expanded product we built on top of Wuzzit Trouble was even more effective.)
But if you log on to brainquake.com today, what you will see is the page below.
The original page leading to the web game is still there; you just have to select the right-hand button for families. The rest of the page is for teachers and other educational professionals. We created this new platform in response to request from teachers for a way to access and incorporate our individual puzzles into their classroom teaching (including assessment).
Our original vision, based on many years of research, much of it by others not connected to us (we based our design on a wealth of previous research) was for a game-based learning tool that aligned with the Common Core State Standards, not at the level of individual curriculum items, which is where the majority of educational technology tools operate, rather on the key (and crucial) eight Mathematical Practices that lead-off and drive the entire Standards. For the CCSS-MP, the focus is on how to do mathematics, rather than what to do. (You need both, of course.)
It was that particular (top-level) focus of our puzzles that resulted in notable learning gains after just a few hours of supplemental use.
Some teachers, not surprisingly, wanted to do more than just assign our game as a supplemental tool, valuable though that can be. They wanted to incorporate particular puzzles into their classes. So we went through our entire puzzle suite (many hundreds of puzzles of widely varying difficulty, requiring different mathematical curriculum topics) and produced the mapping that would enable them to do that with ease.
To be honest, that wasn’t a monumental task. We had already created a skeleton of such a classification in order to construct the game as soon as we began building our game out from Wuzzit Trouble with that large Department of Education award we won. We just had to code that mapping explicitly into the platform in a fashion that teachers could use.
In particular, we had to make it possible for a teacher to be able to select puzzles by CCSS curriculum-item reference number (topic and grade level) from whatever LMS (learning management system) they were using.
We are, then, LMS agnostic. You don’t need to master a new interface.
As always, with our product designed and built based on solid research, we are not in the business of flashy ads to get attention. We just let the quality and proven-effectiveness of the product speak for itself. Whether you are a teacher, a school principal, or a district leader, just click on the appropriate button on the website and take it from there. If you have any questions, let us know and we’ll be glad to respond.
Teachers asked us to do this; and as always (being former teachers, education researchers, and mathematicians ourselves), we listened. We hope you find this new platform useful. We’d love to hear your reaction.
–Keith
