
DragonBox: Secretly teach algebra to your children - rkda
http://www.dragonboxapp.com/
======
lacostej
Hello HN !

Thanks to the nice comments here. Very appreciated!

To add a bit to the discussion: we made 3 games so far, 2 versions of our
algebra game and one about geometry (Euclidian geometry proof really).

We also co-organized Algebra Challenges with our research partner the
University of Washington. As an example, one of those events, in Norway last
year, gathered 36k students from ages 7 to 16. They solved almost 8 million
equations in under a week.

We are not just app makers, we are more focused on providing tools and social
innovations.

We would like to do coding one day, but first things first! Our next games are
targeting younger kids and number sense.

Feel free to ask questions, or take contact!

Jerome, head-nerd @ WWTK :)

~~~
dyarosla
I've recommended dragon box to quite a few people- it's really done
gamification right. It's simply an app to aspire to for other educational game
developers; there's often times where I wanted my own lightbot to 'be like
dragon box but for coding'. Amazing work guys!

~~~
simeonf
I loved dragonbox and so did my daughters. I just bought lightbot jr for my 4
year old and tweeted a pic. He's currently muttering to himself and it's
cracking me up - "Oh this one is hard. All you have to do is put an arrow. Now
let's turn the other way." He's debugging! Thanks a bunch!

------
ColinWright
I expect I'm too late to the party for this comment to be noticed, but I
thought I'd add something.

Some three years ago when a Wired article about this was submitted[0] I wrote
an extended comment[1] expressing some concerns about this. The Wired article
has since gone missing, but the HN discussion remains.

Let me say from the get-go that _anything_ that helps get over the barrier for
playing with, experimenting with, and generally messing about with algebra
type stuff is a Good Thing(tm). I'm really pleased to see this here and doing
well.

There is a comment here[2] that gives an instance of exactly the sort of thing
I'm worried about. Kids could play the game for a bit, decide they've had
enough, and then move on. The question is: will the things they've done in
playing the game have a positive effect?

I can envisaged the possibility that kids that have played DragonBox and then
moved on with get introduced to "proper" algebra later and not even bother
trying too hard, because they'll think "I've done this, I don't care any
more."

So let me say that I think it's important that these things exist, and I think
it's great that they are being developed, and I really want them to succeed in
their own right. But having said that, I'd be reluctant to herald games like
this as the future of teaching math.

I'll finish here by quoting the last paragraph of my previous lengthy
reply[1]:

    
    
        ... I think this is a wonderful tool, and it has the
        potential to be a fantastic aid to learning.  I am
        deeply uneasy about the further divorcing of algebraic
        manipulation from any sense of meaning, but I look
        forward with interest to see if it can be used in a
        meaningful way.
    
    

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4105397](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4105397)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4106567](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4106567)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9472466](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9472466)

~~~
zeidrich
Edutainment is always iffy business. The problem with this is it is trying to
make a game out of doing algebra. In the end the only point of this is doing
algebra.

Contrast this to something like Kerbal Space Program. This is a game about
shooting rockets to other planets. In playing KSP, I've learned a bunch about
orbital mechanics, which is the quite obvious result. If you were making an
edutainment game to teach about how to work with orbital mechanics, it would
look like KSP.

But the secret thing that the game has done is make me revisit calculus. You
have a rocket that has a certain force at sea level, a certain force in the
upper atmosphere, you have a mass that is a full tank of fuel, and a mass that
is an empty tank of fuel. You have aerodynamic drag that changes with the
density of the atmosphere.

It gives you some information, and you can go and get mods which give you more
information (and expose you to more of the math, but at your own request). Or
you can do what I did and take experimental data and build your own model.

But when I'm doing this it's not to balance an equation. It's because I want
to get a rocket to the Mun, it's because I want to build the cheapest ship
that can take space tourists up and down to fund my space empire. It's because
I want to build a base on a distant planet. It's just that in order to do
that, I learn me some calculus, and some orbital mechanics, and some other
things until I can break some of it down in my head, until I'm talking about
thrust to weight ratios, delta v, specific impulse etc. like they're no big
deal.

A game like dragonbox falls into the edutainment trap. It's a game about
balancing an equation on either side of a playfield. It's too abstract. It's
just doing math problems with pictures.

It's like all the different typing tutors that we were given in computer class
when I was growing up. Even the most gamified ones like mario teaches typing,
or later typing of the dead, were still typing tutors.

But what really improved my typing speed more than any typing tutor out there
was when I started playing Everquest online, and later World of Warcraft.
Because in those games, before voice comms were common place, you had to be
able to communicate reasonably effectively, but quickly, and in the middle of
doing other things.

I wasn't typing to get points typing. I was typing on the way to do things
that I enjoyed. Nobody would sponsor a World of Warcraft class to teach
typing, first of all it wouldn't necessarily be effective, how much you type
depends on the individual, plus it wouldn't be particularly fast, and it would
be impossible to test on.

But we don't learn things well by learning them fast and then dropping them.
We learn things well by being engaged in them and repeating them frequently
over a long period of time. KSP will do good things for my calculus, because
there's a lot of space to cover in that game and it's fun to explore space. A
game like dragonbox is not interesting enough to say a year after finishing
the challenges "Ah man, I really want to pick that up again and play through
it again." it doesn't engage your imagination, it doesn't give you any context
except "Solve this disguised math problem and get a gold star"

edit: All that said, I'm still happy the program exists, and I hope it does
well. I do think it takes the wrong approach, and I do think that edutainment
in general really misses the mark, as does the current "gamification" trends
we're seeing around other places. That said, I don't think it would do harm,
and it will definitely expose kids to algebra in a way that could definitely
help them.

I guess my point is more that sometimes the better way to teach is to do it
more indirectly. If another game that was really interesting on its own merits
allowed you to excel by figuring out algebra, that game is a more organic way
of learning, and it also makes the subject matter more meaningful. It's also
incredibly hard to measure or predict it's efficacy, so you can't really sell
it to parents as a way to teach algebra any more than you could sell WoW to
parents as a typing tutor.

~~~
Jach
There's a related thought I have with this whole idea, and it's that these
types of tools mainly end up used for "circus math". Math that once may have
been useful, just as slide rules were useful, but in modern times have much
less direct value and seem mainly to be for show. When you're revisiting
calculus in order to accomplish some goal, are you doing everything by hand or
are you leveraging software like Maple, Octave, Wolfram Alpha, Python, Julia,
or a plain TI-89? Do you derive or memorize or keep a handy table of
integration/derivative formulas? Do you ever do integration by parts and show
all your work? Where there are nth order DEs, Laplace Transforms can be very
useful (and lead to the tremendously useful Fourier Transform), but do you do
partial fractions by hand so you can get an expression to something you can
easily invert by inspection (with a handy table reference maybe)?

I wonder if there's not some way to skip a lot of the _tedium_ of algebraic
manipulation that is forced upon students, such that students can learn how to
use algebra as a tool to solve problems, rather than as an interesting written
dance where each step is shown that they must perform for points. These sorts
of games may make the tedium go by quicker, and there is something to be said
that understanding can come through rote, but once a student grasps the
meaning of these things, I think we should immediately encourage that student
to avoid as much tedium as possible and move on to higher subjects instead of
more and more worksheets testing knowledge of process rather than knowledge of
usefulness.

I occasionally link back to this text (ignoring the controversial remarks on
violent video games):
[http://www.theodoregray.com/BrainRot/](http://www.theodoregray.com/BrainRot/)
In short, if you think of the brain as a limited resource, then all these
numerical and analytical methods that were needed before computers have a cost
-- one which our intelligent ancestors paid for out of necessity, and it's
foolish to suppose these things don't require significant amounts of
brainpower or cognitive resources. Is this cost still worth it for most of
them, is the amount of brainpower in fact trivial despite our ancestors'
struggles, were they just stupider back then? Do our children have enough
resources that they can learn all they knew, at least until the final exam,
_and then_ all we've found out about higher levels of math and about automated
computation this last generation? I don't think so.

~~~
ColinWright
This is a point of view that I'm hearing a lot now, mostly from technically
capable people who know that computer algebra systems exist and are more
reliable than doing everything by hand. And there is merit in the argument,
but I've always felt uncomfortable about it, as if something was missing.

More recently I think I've identified what it is, and I included a little rant
about it in my blog post about the birthday problem[0].

In particular, you've said:

    
    
        > I wonder if there's not some way
        > to skip a lot of the tedium of
        > algebraic manipulation that is
        > forced upon students,
    

I'd like to compare this with the idea of missing all the tedium of practising
the cross-court forehand drive in table tennis. And the answer in that case is
no, not if you want to be a top flight player. You need your body to recognise
the shot automatically and play it without thinking, so your brain is released
to do the higher-order stuff necessary to work on the problem, not the detail.

But more than that, sometimes it's the hours of practice in algebra (or
similar) that means that when something turns up _in disguise_ then you still
recognise it, and still know how to torture the equations to twist them into
the standard form.

It's really hard to explain. Sometime I'll have another go at it, try to put
into words the meta-intuition I've developed over the past 40 years. In the
meantime, the side-box with the rant is the best I've managed.

[0]
[http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/TheBirthdayParadox.html#toc_na...](http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/TheBirthdayParadox.html#toc_name003)

------
scrrr
I don't know about this particular software, but I'm not too sure about this
whole "giving my kid an advantage in life early on" business.

I think there was a study done [1] that showed that love and security and the
availability of parents and family mixed with a certain degree of freedom were
more crucial to success later in life than skills such as math. It allowed
children to explore the world on their own, but if anything bad happened they
could always rely on parents to be there for them. To tell them things would
be fine, or to put a band-aid on their wounds. This allows children to develop
trust in others, self-confidence and a positive outlook in life. While at the
same time motivating them to explore the world.

However, another very important thing was allowing the kids to join in when
the family (or other kids) were solving a problem. This could be anything from
helping with cooking, fixing something in the house or collecting firewood. I
assume the benefit of this was not only practice of problem-solving and social
skills, but also allowing them to develop a sense of self-worth.

(The problem is, I guess, that our modern world is solving all our problems
for us. We don't repair, we replace. We buy solutions for things that we'd had
better dealt with ourselves. And so forth. And that we put so much emphasis on
self-reliance, which seems to be a good thing but in reality has serious
disadvantages. I believe this is one of the big (root-) problems of our modern
civilisation that nobody seems to be talking about, but I might be wrong.)

Furthermore, the ability to work on a specific problem _with others_ is a
different from being able to do maths alone. It teaches all the right things
in life.

So I guess the point is: If you want your kid to succeed, be there for and
allow it to take part in life the way he or she choses to (all within
reasonable limits of course, you still need raise your kids to be decent
etc.), especially with others.

[1] wish I had a link.. :/

~~~
jbhkb1
designer of DragonBox Algebra here... 0- i totally agree with your post : )
1-the game was never conceived as a headstart product! 2-our goal is to
deliver products that introduce the big ideas in math in an engaging and
efficient way, because math can be such an unnecessary pain for many children
3-we recommend to play DragonBox with family members : ) 4- your reference [1]
could be about self regulation (social interaction primarily) and academic
achievement:
[http://people.oregonstate.edu/~mcclellm/ms/Morrison,%20Ponit...](http://people.oregonstate.edu/~mcclellm/ms/Morrison,%20Ponitz,%20McClelland%20in%20press.pdf)

~~~
ZeroBugBounce
> 1-the game was never conceived as a headstart product!

True that may be, but the blurb on the "DragonBox Algebra 5+" product on the
linked page says:

"It’s perfect for giving your child a head start in mathematics and algebra. "

~~~
jbhkb1
interesting point. It was not conceived as headstart, but it is sold as
headstart. I want it as a real game, and i want it as an efficient learning
tool. I want it for discovery and shared learning moment, and i want it for
avoiding math challenges later. I want it for pleasure and i want it to teach
very difficult stuff quickly. Seems like many contradictions here. arghh u
revealed that i m human i guess : ), with incompatible goals and complex
realities. At the same time, this complexity and contradiction makes it a very
interesting challenge : )

------
toxicFork
Is there something like this but for code?

I can imagine having some visual blocks and wires to get a wanted output
image, and then gradually it could use symbols or function names instead of
the pictures, or you could even go deeper into the blocks to get down to more
lower level instructions...

Like Blueprints in UE4 :
[https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Blueprints/G...](https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Blueprints/GettingStarted/index.html)

~~~
Ollinson
Spacechem
[http://www.zachtronics.com/spacechem/](http://www.zachtronics.com/spacechem/)

It's not intended at all as a programming education product but I think that's
what's so great about it.

~~~
falcolas
Plus one to spacechem. Not only does it teach the basic programming elements,
it goes really deep into handling concurrent operations.

I can't recommend it enough to help explain programming concepts, and as a
brain teaser for my colleagues.

------
dworin
Dragonbox isn't just for kids! My sister was studying for the GRE and
struggling with the math section. For people who aren't as into math, there
are a lot of things you forgot, and probably a few you just never learned
right (for her it was fractions/division). She gives DragonBox a lot of credit
for helping her boost her score, and she still plays with it from time to time
just because it's fun.

------
dicroce
DragonBox is the best. I have bought literally everything this company has
created... and I will continue to do so.

Take a look at this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLA-
fde2eR0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLA-fde2eR0)

That is the typical response to the game... My own boys were solving equations
within a few hours... This is clearly how math should be taught...

------
politiken
There was an interview with the guy who made it on Quartz this week:
[http://qz.com/390854/the-video-game-that-teaches-algebra-
to-...](http://qz.com/390854/the-video-game-that-teaches-algebra-to-4-year-
olds/)

~~~
rkda
Apparently it became so popular in Norway that it actually beat Angry Birds
there. Granted, that was in 2012

[http://archive.wired.com/geekdad/2012/06/dragonbox/all/](http://archive.wired.com/geekdad/2012/06/dragonbox/all/)

~~~
politiken
There is also this one from Forbes. It claims it only takes 42 minutes, but
that depends on how you define "learning algebra", i guess. Still a great game
that both my kids loved.

~~~
rkda
Can you post the link to the article? Thanks!

Edit: Found it!

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/jordanshapiro/2013/07/01/it-
only...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jordanshapiro/2013/07/01/it-only-takes-
about-42-minutes-to-learn-algebra-with-video-games/)

------
disposablename
See also: Frog Fractions! [http://jayisgames.com/games/frog-
fractions/](http://jayisgames.com/games/frog-fractions/)

------
nicolethenerd
Funny coincidence - I was just reading about DragonBox this morning in The
Game Believes in You (a new book by Greg Toppo about educational games) and
here it is on HN! The book is a good read (so far) if you're interested in
this sort of stuff.

------
S4M
Wow, I am working on something very similar... still in beta... it's here:
[http://magako.com/exercise/symbolic/eng](http://magako.com/exercise/symbolic/eng)

------
pete23
This is brilliant. My kids at 7 and 5 loved it.

~~~
rkda
Do they still play it or have they outgrown it now?

~~~
sswaner
My daughter and I were discussing middle school (she will be in 6th grade next
year). She said she wanted to replay DragonBox to help get her ready for
algebra class. She mastered the game in a day last year and still recalls it
as her favorite game "that actually taught her something".

------
dankohn1
Yeah, my kids went all the way through this at 5. It's amazing.

~~~
MichaelGG
I gave it to my 5 year old and she loved it. The best part was after a few
sections, I wrote out simple "x + 5 = 7" type equations and she had no trouble
figuring them out. I try to get them to understand the same for other things.
A billion plus a million is easy, it is similar as an orange plus a pear.

It's so awesome to see their eyes open up at these things. My younger daughter
has been going on for days about powers of two. She doesn't know how to
multiply, but exponentiaton just tickles her. I showed her some of Vi Hart's
videos, and now she's in love with hexaflexagons.

It's so wonderful to see the beauty of math, and moreso when a child is
discovering it.

------
zenocon
I have used this game with my 5 yo (now 6), and I can say that it is done
really well, and kept him engaged. YMMV, but this seems like the right
approach for math/edu apps.

------
klunger
I interned with these guys back in 2012 when I was a student. They are a
really great team with an inspiring vision. So glad to see them here on the
front page!

------
ommunist
I wished my kid never touched iPhone before the age of 16, but that is
impossible. However this app justifies iPhone usage by kid, for a little bit.

~~~
vnchr
Excessive screen time is a real challenge for this generation that's been born
to it.

We (SO and I) have a newborn, and I often use my computer or phone around him.
We think it might be detrimental to his development if he used electronics as
much as I do, but I am not a good example to him.

Our strategy for balance is to (1) provide a lot of alternative means for
engagement like outdoor activities, excursions, and interesting physical toys;
and (2) provide many useful learning apps like this one that will harness
healthy, natural interest in electronics with added developmental and
educational benefits.

Growing up, I always sought out electronics and gadgets, from Gameboy, to Palm
Pilot, to iPhone. But I think we are well past the tipping point where
moderation is easier than excess with mobile devices. Adding more of the
"good" stuff, we hope, will crowd out too much of the "bad" stuff.

~~~
ommunist
Yup, in our case strict private catholic school is not an option.

------
rkda
Wish more elearning games were like this. Ones I had were terribly boring.

~~~
eric_bullington
For younger kids, like preschool age, we had pretty good luck with games from
Thup Games[1]. The sounds effects from the games will drive you nuts after a
while (so headphones are handy), but I recall my kids learning a lot of
reading skills from these apps.

Haven't had as much luck with educational apps now that my kids are post pre-
school, so I'm very glad to see the recommendations for Dragonbox.

1\. [http://thup.com/](http://thup.com/)

~~~
rkda
Don't have kids yet but I'll bookmark this for when the time comes. Thanks!
;-)

------
pratikch
This appears to be good. Worth a try.

------
esaym
This looks awesome, but unfortunately I made a rule in my house that says "You
can't play a video game in this house unless you are the one that invented
it", so now I am quite conflicted...

~~~
rkda
Just curious, what's with the rule? Also, do they know how to code already?

~~~
monk_e_boy
And how would they possibly create a good game without playing one?

~~~
julius
The rule excludes video games at the childrens house. The rule says nothing
about playing video games at a friends house or board games etc. at home.

