SBIR Phase I: Mathemantics: Diagnostic Math Games for Kindergarten Children

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I research project builds on decades of math education research, most of which has failed to have much impact in ordinary classrooms. Our immediate objective is to create a rich mathematical world for young students to explore, within that world to pose developmentally appropriate challenges, to monitor children as they engage in problem solving, analyze their actions to make informed inferences regarding their learning, and use the results of that analysis to inform teachers and to make instructionally relevant suggestions. The project will observe students' interaction with Mathemantics in the absence of mentoring, looking for opportunities where such a mentor might usefully have intervened. Based on these observations, the project will add to Mathemantics a friendly computer-based avatar who will react to patterns of student actions and provide context-sensitive help and feedback. The project will aggregate student performance data and use it to generate formative assessments in the form of diagnostic reports to teachers. The underlying goal is to introduce knowledge gained from math education and cognitive science research into elementary classrooms by packaging it for teachers and students in a usable and actionable form. In prior work a sequence of prototype Mathemantics games was created. It was demonstrated that children found them engaging and that they learned important mathematical concepts from them, albeit in the presence of a graduate student who guided them and gave them feedback. Now the project proposes to demonstrate that with appropriate scaffolding these games can 'stand alone' so that children will understand them and find them motivating, and most of all that they will learn from them. It is also hopes that Mathemantics is capable of generating formative assessments that teachers find accessible and useful. These assessments will be aligned to mCLASS:Math, an application for handheld computers that guides teachers through 'clinical interviews' with individual students and analyzes data teacher-entered to produce diagnostic reports. Pending a successful outcome of this feasibility study, an enhanced version of mCLASS:Math will be produced which will offer suggestions for how to customize Mathemantics to meet the needs and match the abilities of individual students. By offering Mathemantics to classrooms already equipped with mCLASS:Math, we will have immediate access to an important 'early adopter' segment of the market.