Some of the myths of the "Digital Native" narrative, and the challenges of Gamification
Due to quarantine, I'm homeschooling my 13 -year-old, while also trying to help my 19 -year-old deal with online community college.
I already believed that the "digital native" narrative had promoted a lot of myths, but if I ever needed to see evidence for this belief, in the last couple of months I've gotten more than I ever could have asked for.
Let me quickly preamble this rant with just a couple of points, lest you think I'm basing my conclusion on only my frustrations with my own children:
On with the show.
The "digital natives" narrative comes from a widely-read 2001 essay written by Marc Prensky. Marc Prensky is a teacher and a "critically acclaimed speaker." He is not a researcher, he does not have a PhD, which doesn't necessarily matter. I'm just pointing that out, because I'm also a former teacher, I've been an instructional designer for a few years, and I also don't have a PhD, but I do have a master's degree. So maybe my thoughts on this are at least as valid as Marc Prensky's.
A lot of what was written in Prensky's piece makes perfect sense, and is probably true. For example, he asserts that people who grew up during the "digital age" most likely process information differently than those who did not. I believe this is absolutely correct, assuming that the people in question actually did have a lot of exposure to "devices." There's no discussion in Prensky's piece about the so-called "digital divide," which is the problem that occurs when children have little or no exposure to computers or electronics and then must play catch-up. That is a very real problem, which definitely does indicate that there is a lot of "skill" involved when it comes to navigating computers, apps, etc.
Prensky makes many points that seem a foregone conclusion: "In geography – which is all but ignored these days – there is no reason that a generation that can memorize over 100 Pokémon characters with all their characteristics, history and evolution can't learn the names, populations, capitals and relationships of all the 101 nations in the world. It just depends on how it is presented."
How can you argue with that line of reasoning? I think he's more-or-less right, don't you?
However, there have been a great many suppositions to come out of this line of thinking that are not correct, and I encountered plenty of these when I was the computer-lady at that elementary school -- not from the students, but from other teachers.
In 2011, UNESCO published a piece called "Digital Natives: How do they learn? How to teach them?" this piece asserted that "They don't need to read the user manual, and they don't ask for lessons on how to use a computer (only teachers ask for such courses!)"
The line I kept hearing from the classroom teachers where I was a para was that there was no reason for me to be creating lesson plans for the kids to learn how to use PowerPoint, Word, or even Excel, because if you just put the kid in front of it, they'll figure it out.
Well! Okay, but--
No. Let me repeat that: No.
This presumption seems to have come from the phenomenon of the toddler with grandma's iPad. It seems as though this is a near-universal experience, at least in reasonably well-to-do western cultures and households. Probably, you've heard this yourself: if you give a toddler grandma's iPad, what will happen?
Oh, well, the toddler will not only have figured out how to play every game on the iPad, including games that grandma didn't even know were on her iPad, the toddler will also hack into grandma's Amazon account and will start purchasing toys with grandma's credit card.
How do they do this, everyone wonders?
There are a couple of reasons why they are able to do this. One reason is because children are extremely motivated to play games, and another reason is because most games, and certain platforms like Amazon, are fantastic examples of beautifully user-friendly design.
Community college website, on the other hand? NOT BEAUTIFULLY USER-FRIENDLY.
Content produced by middle-school teachers who have never taught online, and are suddenly asked to to teach virtually due to a global pandemic?
....What do you think this content looks like?
Honestly, the shortest possible way to describe the problem with community college websites and content produced by middle school teachers is that they lack big shiny buttons that say "GO" or "CLICK HERE."
When I was an instructional design intern for an online university, there was an ongoing debate about whether to link to text that said "CLICK HERE," or just to link to the text. The general consensus was that it was sort of insulting to the learner to write "CLICK HERE", and/or distracting.
This *may* be true for online university students. But when we're talking about middle schoolers, I think learning design needs to be a bit different than when we're talking about online university students, who presumably already know to click on a line of highlighted text, even if it appears within a big block of text.
Well, wait.
Unless we're talking about my kid, apparently. My kid, who was born the year that Prensky's essay originally appeared.
Listen, my kids are definitely not dummies. But they are struggling terribly with the sheer amount of content that is being thrown at them. They are struggling with trying to figure out how to organize their gmail inboxes. They are struggling to figure out how to determine what's important and what's not important. While I do believe they have learned very rudimentary prioritizing skills, when we're talking about this many emails, they are overwhelmed and practically traumatized. What I'm seeing happen is major avoidance. Shutting down completely.
Lots and lots of tears. Many of them coming from me.
My kids go back-and-forth between my house and their dad's house. I have them for two weeks at a time, and then he has them for two weeks. The last time my kids "switched houses," I quickly learned that neither of them had been doing their work while they were at their dad's.
Their dad is an elementary school teacher, by the way, which is only partially relevant to this discussion. He's busy teaching his own online classes, and doesn't have a lot of time to help his own kids, so I don't mean to blame him. I just mean that he's trying to figure all this out right along with everyone else.
I'm unemployed, so I've got nothing better to do. I'm also an instructional designer with a master's degree in learning sciences, and I'm struggling to help my kids.
When it dawned on me that nobody ever expressly taught my 13-year old how to organize her emails, a bunch of lights went on in my brain. She doesn't have fancy tools like what are available in outlook express, but when I showed her how to "star" important emails, and how to change the view to only look at the emails with a star on them, then at least a quarter of her problem was instantly solved.
Her dad and I had both just assumed that she would automatically know how to do something like this.
Why did we assume that? Oh, because of the pervasive "Digital Natives" myth, that's why.
My 19-year-old, meanwhile, has never used Word, because why would a kid use Word when there's Google Docs? Except that some classes require Word, and some classes require Google Docs, and my kid is convinced that Word is inherently mysterious and terrifying just because it's not Google Docs, and some of the menus are not in the same place, and some of the items on the ribbon look slightly different, etc.
This is akin to when facebook suddenly changes its layout and there is a near-mutiny for about a week, until everyone adjusts and then realizes that it's no big deal.
Or...it's akin to my last instructional design contract, wherein an entire hospital supply-chain department was asked to use a different Enterprise Resource Planning system than the one they had been using for the last decade or so, and people in every possible age category were threatening to quit. Which is why I was hired to make job aids. Some people in HR kept insisting that we didn't need job aids, because everyone would figure it out within a month or so.
Yes, but exactly what do you propose to do during that month when everyone is figuring it out? Funny story: the month that everyone had to figure it out just happened to be three months prior to a global pandemic, when hospital supply chain became incredibly important. Let's just suppose, for fun, that the entire supply chain department of a hospital was asked to just "figure it out" during a global pandemic, and there were no job aids, because HR had insisted they weren't needed?
Well meanwhile, in the words of my 19-year-old, "I'm terrified I'm going to miss something and flunk an assignment, or flunk a whole class. Half the time, I get some form that has a bunch of yes-no questions that aren't even really yes-no questions, and I don't know which box to check. The form won't allow you to turn it in if you leave anything blank, and if I don't turn it in I get a zero. What if I screw something up and lose my financial aid? It's too much!"
"I need to talk to a person," my kid says, while actually sobbing.
Yes, that's correct. My Gen-Z kid who is supposedly a "digital native" and supposedly needs no help learning how to navigate an online form.
Whenever I go through these forms with my kids, I find that it's not actually all that complicated. They simply can't parse through that much online text without getting overwhelmed with avoidant feelings. At least one reason for this is because they've grown up during a time when teachers have been working so hard to "gamify" learning and "make learning fun," that a lot of teachers have eliminated much of the plain old-fashioned work that it takes to actually accomplish anything.
I have witnessed it. Repeatedly.
The reality is that certain types of learning (abstract, mathematical) are difficult no matter how you try to dress them up. They have to be difficult, or else learning just doesn't happen.
But there's another reason why my kids are struggling with all of this. If there is one thing that the "digital natives" narrative did get right, it's that these kids don't learn the way that my generation learned. Constant onscreen time has changed the way they process. Because they are accustomed to instant gratification, they can't parse through a giant block of onscreen text well enough to figure out what they're supposed to do. For that reason, I know it's unlikely that a Gen-Zer (or even most millennials) will ever even bother to read this blog. If I wanted to write material that caters to that cohort, I would have to eliminate a great deal of my blah-blah.
To go back to my point about how toddlers easily figure out games on grandma's iPad, let's point out that games are deeply rewarding to human brains. There is a great deal of evidence about the ways that video games stimulate various reward centers in the brains, up to a point that has been speculated to be "unnatural."
Learning how to use Excel (abstract, mathematical) does not and will not ever stimulate those same reward centers in a human brain the way that video games do. Take it from me, a former computer-lady at an elementary school: there is no way to effectively "gamify" teaching Microsoft Excel to sixth-graders. Yes, you can try to turn it into a challenge of some sort, and that might help motivate some learners. I encourage you to do so.
It still will not make most students excited to do it. It will not make it "fun." The best you can hope for is just that it will make them hate it slightly less. The worst you can hope for is that if it's too fun, they won't actually learn anything.
That's the terrible reality about learning abstract/mathematical material: while it's possible to make it rewarding, it can't be entirely "fun," because that kind of learning is a little bit painful by its very nature. It's painful because it requires the use of certain brain systems that are very difficult to engage and use. There are many books to reference on the subject of the so-called "difficult-to-use" processes of the brain ("Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman, and "Your Brain at Work" by David Rock are two good ones). There has also been much written about how the constant use of digital devices has curtailed human's ability to engage with these processes, including older people who used to be avid readers.
Engaging those thinking and learning processes has become the most difficult job of a teacher. Once a student has gone through the hard work of engaging those processes, then learning can begin.
Learning can be inherently rewarding. The brain does offer up "rewards," in the form of endorphins and neurotransmitters, for learning new stuff. But I would argue that "rewarding" is not the same as "fun."
This is because the learning brain-rewards are simply not as exciting and juicy as the instant gratification video game brain-rewards. I'm talking about dopamine. Learning produces some dopamine, but not a lot. Video games, on the other hand, can produce a whole lot of dopamine.
I am aware that educational game developers are going to try to continue to figure out how to make math games that will tap into those same video game brain reward systems, but I tell you, I'm not sure if it's possible. This is simply because the kids' brains have got to be primed to get into those "learning" processes before they ever sit down in front of an educational game in the first place.
I do strongly believe that it's possible to make some kind of a game or application that could help kids get into the right mindset to work on higher-level mathematics. It's also possible to make a game that includes mathematics which could be educationally valuable --but to repeat, the kids have got to be primed before they'll even be engaged enough to play such a game. I'm not sure if there could be a game that could successfully do both. By nature, kids would have to feel avoidant about any game that would force them to use their mathematical processing centers, because human beings in general do not like to use those parts of their brains.
And so, in my current opinion, we can never make mathematics into a game that will actually appeal to schoolchildren to the point that they will ever be excited to play that game.
You take the application Fastt Math for example, which is a game that helps kids memorize times tables. This game has been demonstrated to help improve students' math skills --as long as they play it very consistently (it needs to be daily, for at least ten minutes a day). But I have it on good authority (me) that kids hate this game. They will play it under extreme duress, and they will do almost anything to avoid playing it.
I taught all grades, kindergarten through sixth grade, and there was not a single child in that entire school who actually enjoyed Fastt Math. Most of them would do it, of course, but I think I heard complaining from each and every child at least one time.
Honestly, it can barely even be called a "game." It's not much different than timed online flash cards. The biggest difference between Fastt Math and flash cards is that the students get a little "reward" for doing tasks correctly. What I remember is that the "reward" was a little digital fireworks display, or something along those lines. I have not done any studies, nor have I seen any studies, but I am guessing that this little reward probably barely registers a blip in their neural reward centers. That is not to say that this little reward is nothing, because the reward does exist, but it is not enough to overcome the unpleasantness of being forced to do multiplication for ten minutes every day.
Moreover, most of the teachers didn't require their students to play the game every single day, which is necessary to see any real benefit. Some of the teachers would drop their students off in my classroom and tell me to "do whatever" with them, which gave me a great opportunity to actually teach them something. (One of my favorite lessons was to teach them how to actually google a subject. I know you don't think kids need to be taught how to google. Think again.)
Other teachers would drop the kids off with about ten minutes of instruction, usually something like, "Okay class, now take out the handwritten rough draft you created last week and type it up in Word." Then the teacher would leave, without ever hesitating to ponder whether the kids actually knew how to use Word.
About two months into the school year, I developed a lesson plan to teach kids how to use Word. It was inspired by the countless numbers of kids who would sit paralyzed in front of the computer screen with a look of abject terror on their faces, probably afraid to ask for help since it had been assumed that they already knew how to use the application, and/or the kids who shed tears when they were instructed to type something in Word.
There was at least one teacher who had bothered to read the research about Fastt Math, and she did require her students to play the "game" for fifteen minutes every day. This was the group I managed to gather the bulk of my observations from, because this was the group who hated that game the most.
That's the trick with the game: the reward has to outweigh the challenge. When it comes to mathematics, that's very difficult to do, because math is very difficult to do.
But Fastt Math is only for rote memorization of times tables. Higher-level mathematics such as long division require the use of the prefrontal cortex, which is is notoriously difficult to engage. Long division requires you to use your working memory, sometimes to its capacity, which can phyisally wear you out. It's actually almost impossible to engage these systems if you are emotional, or tired, or otherwise distracted. Well, okay, maybe "almost impossible" is a stretch, but let's just say it's very hard.
People hate to do hard things anyway. For a cohort that is accustomed to instant gratification, engaging the prefrontal cortex is damn near impossible, unless they've been expressly taught how to focus.
Once students are taught how to focus, I do have suggestions for ways that elementary school teachers could "gamify" learning, or at least make it slightly less tiresome for the kids. I have plenty of them, in fact. But this post is already long, which means that almost nobody under the age of 30 will even read this far.
I already believed that the "digital native" narrative had promoted a lot of myths, but if I ever needed to see evidence for this belief, in the last couple of months I've gotten more than I ever could have asked for.
Let me quickly preamble this rant with just a couple of points, lest you think I'm basing my conclusion on only my frustrations with my own children:
- I used to be a computer-lab paraeducator for a K-6 (elementary) school and
- I have a master's degree in learning sciences.
On with the show.
The "digital natives" narrative comes from a widely-read 2001 essay written by Marc Prensky. Marc Prensky is a teacher and a "critically acclaimed speaker." He is not a researcher, he does not have a PhD, which doesn't necessarily matter. I'm just pointing that out, because I'm also a former teacher, I've been an instructional designer for a few years, and I also don't have a PhD, but I do have a master's degree. So maybe my thoughts on this are at least as valid as Marc Prensky's.
A lot of what was written in Prensky's piece makes perfect sense, and is probably true. For example, he asserts that people who grew up during the "digital age" most likely process information differently than those who did not. I believe this is absolutely correct, assuming that the people in question actually did have a lot of exposure to "devices." There's no discussion in Prensky's piece about the so-called "digital divide," which is the problem that occurs when children have little or no exposure to computers or electronics and then must play catch-up. That is a very real problem, which definitely does indicate that there is a lot of "skill" involved when it comes to navigating computers, apps, etc.
Prensky makes many points that seem a foregone conclusion: "In geography – which is all but ignored these days – there is no reason that a generation that can memorize over 100 Pokémon characters with all their characteristics, history and evolution can't learn the names, populations, capitals and relationships of all the 101 nations in the world. It just depends on how it is presented."
How can you argue with that line of reasoning? I think he's more-or-less right, don't you?
However, there have been a great many suppositions to come out of this line of thinking that are not correct, and I encountered plenty of these when I was the computer-lady at that elementary school -- not from the students, but from other teachers.
In 2011, UNESCO published a piece called "Digital Natives: How do they learn? How to teach them?" this piece asserted that "They don't need to read the user manual, and they don't ask for lessons on how to use a computer (only teachers ask for such courses!)"
The line I kept hearing from the classroom teachers where I was a para was that there was no reason for me to be creating lesson plans for the kids to learn how to use PowerPoint, Word, or even Excel, because if you just put the kid in front of it, they'll figure it out.
Well! Okay, but--
No. Let me repeat that: No.
This presumption seems to have come from the phenomenon of the toddler with grandma's iPad. It seems as though this is a near-universal experience, at least in reasonably well-to-do western cultures and households. Probably, you've heard this yourself: if you give a toddler grandma's iPad, what will happen?
Oh, well, the toddler will not only have figured out how to play every game on the iPad, including games that grandma didn't even know were on her iPad, the toddler will also hack into grandma's Amazon account and will start purchasing toys with grandma's credit card.
How do they do this, everyone wonders?
There are a couple of reasons why they are able to do this. One reason is because children are extremely motivated to play games, and another reason is because most games, and certain platforms like Amazon, are fantastic examples of beautifully user-friendly design.
Community college website, on the other hand? NOT BEAUTIFULLY USER-FRIENDLY.
Content produced by middle-school teachers who have never taught online, and are suddenly asked to to teach virtually due to a global pandemic?
....What do you think this content looks like?
Honestly, the shortest possible way to describe the problem with community college websites and content produced by middle school teachers is that they lack big shiny buttons that say "GO" or "CLICK HERE."
When I was an instructional design intern for an online university, there was an ongoing debate about whether to link to text that said "CLICK HERE," or just to link to the text. The general consensus was that it was sort of insulting to the learner to write "CLICK HERE", and/or distracting.
This *may* be true for online university students. But when we're talking about middle schoolers, I think learning design needs to be a bit different than when we're talking about online university students, who presumably already know to click on a line of highlighted text, even if it appears within a big block of text.
Well, wait.
Unless we're talking about my kid, apparently. My kid, who was born the year that Prensky's essay originally appeared.
Listen, my kids are definitely not dummies. But they are struggling terribly with the sheer amount of content that is being thrown at them. They are struggling with trying to figure out how to organize their gmail inboxes. They are struggling to figure out how to determine what's important and what's not important. While I do believe they have learned very rudimentary prioritizing skills, when we're talking about this many emails, they are overwhelmed and practically traumatized. What I'm seeing happen is major avoidance. Shutting down completely.
Lots and lots of tears. Many of them coming from me.
My kids go back-and-forth between my house and their dad's house. I have them for two weeks at a time, and then he has them for two weeks. The last time my kids "switched houses," I quickly learned that neither of them had been doing their work while they were at their dad's.
Their dad is an elementary school teacher, by the way, which is only partially relevant to this discussion. He's busy teaching his own online classes, and doesn't have a lot of time to help his own kids, so I don't mean to blame him. I just mean that he's trying to figure all this out right along with everyone else.
I'm unemployed, so I've got nothing better to do. I'm also an instructional designer with a master's degree in learning sciences, and I'm struggling to help my kids.
When it dawned on me that nobody ever expressly taught my 13-year old how to organize her emails, a bunch of lights went on in my brain. She doesn't have fancy tools like what are available in outlook express, but when I showed her how to "star" important emails, and how to change the view to only look at the emails with a star on them, then at least a quarter of her problem was instantly solved.
Her dad and I had both just assumed that she would automatically know how to do something like this.
Why did we assume that? Oh, because of the pervasive "Digital Natives" myth, that's why.
My 19-year-old, meanwhile, has never used Word, because why would a kid use Word when there's Google Docs? Except that some classes require Word, and some classes require Google Docs, and my kid is convinced that Word is inherently mysterious and terrifying just because it's not Google Docs, and some of the menus are not in the same place, and some of the items on the ribbon look slightly different, etc.
This is akin to when facebook suddenly changes its layout and there is a near-mutiny for about a week, until everyone adjusts and then realizes that it's no big deal.
Or...it's akin to my last instructional design contract, wherein an entire hospital supply-chain department was asked to use a different Enterprise Resource Planning system than the one they had been using for the last decade or so, and people in every possible age category were threatening to quit. Which is why I was hired to make job aids. Some people in HR kept insisting that we didn't need job aids, because everyone would figure it out within a month or so.
Yes, but exactly what do you propose to do during that month when everyone is figuring it out? Funny story: the month that everyone had to figure it out just happened to be three months prior to a global pandemic, when hospital supply chain became incredibly important. Let's just suppose, for fun, that the entire supply chain department of a hospital was asked to just "figure it out" during a global pandemic, and there were no job aids, because HR had insisted they weren't needed?
Well meanwhile, in the words of my 19-year-old, "I'm terrified I'm going to miss something and flunk an assignment, or flunk a whole class. Half the time, I get some form that has a bunch of yes-no questions that aren't even really yes-no questions, and I don't know which box to check. The form won't allow you to turn it in if you leave anything blank, and if I don't turn it in I get a zero. What if I screw something up and lose my financial aid? It's too much!"
"I need to talk to a person," my kid says, while actually sobbing.
Yes, that's correct. My Gen-Z kid who is supposedly a "digital native" and supposedly needs no help learning how to navigate an online form.
Whenever I go through these forms with my kids, I find that it's not actually all that complicated. They simply can't parse through that much online text without getting overwhelmed with avoidant feelings. At least one reason for this is because they've grown up during a time when teachers have been working so hard to "gamify" learning and "make learning fun," that a lot of teachers have eliminated much of the plain old-fashioned work that it takes to actually accomplish anything.
I have witnessed it. Repeatedly.
The reality is that certain types of learning (abstract, mathematical) are difficult no matter how you try to dress them up. They have to be difficult, or else learning just doesn't happen.
But there's another reason why my kids are struggling with all of this. If there is one thing that the "digital natives" narrative did get right, it's that these kids don't learn the way that my generation learned. Constant onscreen time has changed the way they process. Because they are accustomed to instant gratification, they can't parse through a giant block of onscreen text well enough to figure out what they're supposed to do. For that reason, I know it's unlikely that a Gen-Zer (or even most millennials) will ever even bother to read this blog. If I wanted to write material that caters to that cohort, I would have to eliminate a great deal of my blah-blah.
To go back to my point about how toddlers easily figure out games on grandma's iPad, let's point out that games are deeply rewarding to human brains. There is a great deal of evidence about the ways that video games stimulate various reward centers in the brains, up to a point that has been speculated to be "unnatural."
Learning how to use Excel (abstract, mathematical) does not and will not ever stimulate those same reward centers in a human brain the way that video games do. Take it from me, a former computer-lady at an elementary school: there is no way to effectively "gamify" teaching Microsoft Excel to sixth-graders. Yes, you can try to turn it into a challenge of some sort, and that might help motivate some learners. I encourage you to do so.
It still will not make most students excited to do it. It will not make it "fun." The best you can hope for is just that it will make them hate it slightly less. The worst you can hope for is that if it's too fun, they won't actually learn anything.
That's the terrible reality about learning abstract/mathematical material: while it's possible to make it rewarding, it can't be entirely "fun," because that kind of learning is a little bit painful by its very nature. It's painful because it requires the use of certain brain systems that are very difficult to engage and use. There are many books to reference on the subject of the so-called "difficult-to-use" processes of the brain ("Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman, and "Your Brain at Work" by David Rock are two good ones). There has also been much written about how the constant use of digital devices has curtailed human's ability to engage with these processes, including older people who used to be avid readers.
Engaging those thinking and learning processes has become the most difficult job of a teacher. Once a student has gone through the hard work of engaging those processes, then learning can begin.
Learning can be inherently rewarding. The brain does offer up "rewards," in the form of endorphins and neurotransmitters, for learning new stuff. But I would argue that "rewarding" is not the same as "fun."
This is because the learning brain-rewards are simply not as exciting and juicy as the instant gratification video game brain-rewards. I'm talking about dopamine. Learning produces some dopamine, but not a lot. Video games, on the other hand, can produce a whole lot of dopamine.
I am aware that educational game developers are going to try to continue to figure out how to make math games that will tap into those same video game brain reward systems, but I tell you, I'm not sure if it's possible. This is simply because the kids' brains have got to be primed to get into those "learning" processes before they ever sit down in front of an educational game in the first place.
I do strongly believe that it's possible to make some kind of a game or application that could help kids get into the right mindset to work on higher-level mathematics. It's also possible to make a game that includes mathematics which could be educationally valuable --but to repeat, the kids have got to be primed before they'll even be engaged enough to play such a game. I'm not sure if there could be a game that could successfully do both. By nature, kids would have to feel avoidant about any game that would force them to use their mathematical processing centers, because human beings in general do not like to use those parts of their brains.
And so, in my current opinion, we can never make mathematics into a game that will actually appeal to schoolchildren to the point that they will ever be excited to play that game.
You take the application Fastt Math for example, which is a game that helps kids memorize times tables. This game has been demonstrated to help improve students' math skills --as long as they play it very consistently (it needs to be daily, for at least ten minutes a day). But I have it on good authority (me) that kids hate this game. They will play it under extreme duress, and they will do almost anything to avoid playing it.
I taught all grades, kindergarten through sixth grade, and there was not a single child in that entire school who actually enjoyed Fastt Math. Most of them would do it, of course, but I think I heard complaining from each and every child at least one time.
Honestly, it can barely even be called a "game." It's not much different than timed online flash cards. The biggest difference between Fastt Math and flash cards is that the students get a little "reward" for doing tasks correctly. What I remember is that the "reward" was a little digital fireworks display, or something along those lines. I have not done any studies, nor have I seen any studies, but I am guessing that this little reward probably barely registers a blip in their neural reward centers. That is not to say that this little reward is nothing, because the reward does exist, but it is not enough to overcome the unpleasantness of being forced to do multiplication for ten minutes every day.
Moreover, most of the teachers didn't require their students to play the game every single day, which is necessary to see any real benefit. Some of the teachers would drop their students off in my classroom and tell me to "do whatever" with them, which gave me a great opportunity to actually teach them something. (One of my favorite lessons was to teach them how to actually google a subject. I know you don't think kids need to be taught how to google. Think again.)
Other teachers would drop the kids off with about ten minutes of instruction, usually something like, "Okay class, now take out the handwritten rough draft you created last week and type it up in Word." Then the teacher would leave, without ever hesitating to ponder whether the kids actually knew how to use Word.
About two months into the school year, I developed a lesson plan to teach kids how to use Word. It was inspired by the countless numbers of kids who would sit paralyzed in front of the computer screen with a look of abject terror on their faces, probably afraid to ask for help since it had been assumed that they already knew how to use the application, and/or the kids who shed tears when they were instructed to type something in Word.
There was at least one teacher who had bothered to read the research about Fastt Math, and she did require her students to play the "game" for fifteen minutes every day. This was the group I managed to gather the bulk of my observations from, because this was the group who hated that game the most.
That's the trick with the game: the reward has to outweigh the challenge. When it comes to mathematics, that's very difficult to do, because math is very difficult to do.
But Fastt Math is only for rote memorization of times tables. Higher-level mathematics such as long division require the use of the prefrontal cortex, which is is notoriously difficult to engage. Long division requires you to use your working memory, sometimes to its capacity, which can phyisally wear you out. It's actually almost impossible to engage these systems if you are emotional, or tired, or otherwise distracted. Well, okay, maybe "almost impossible" is a stretch, but let's just say it's very hard.
People hate to do hard things anyway. For a cohort that is accustomed to instant gratification, engaging the prefrontal cortex is damn near impossible, unless they've been expressly taught how to focus.
Once students are taught how to focus, I do have suggestions for ways that elementary school teachers could "gamify" learning, or at least make it slightly less tiresome for the kids. I have plenty of them, in fact. But this post is already long, which means that almost nobody under the age of 30 will even read this far.
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