Website Worth Sharing: Polyup
It’s sometimes tricky to find interactive sites that go beyond basic operations and encourage students to THINK. If you want your students to practice number sense and apply higher level thinking skills (all the way up to Calculus) you might want to check out https://www.polyup.com/ They describe it as “a free and open computational thinking playground: Modify expressions, functions, and algorithms to discover the beauty of math.” It is recommended for grades 3 through 12, so there’s something for all levels. There’s an animation on the homepage that shows you a little how it works. If you want a more detailed introduction, check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlX3QhXlmZQ or this playlist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlX3QhXlmZQ&list=PLpe4uySx4v_OiEZfjF-WlUlBt2EvJRBqc&index=2 Teacher resources, including a teacher’s guide can be found here: https://www.polyup.com/educators/ Scroll to the bottom of the page for Google Slide presentations you can use to present this to your students (they thought of everything!) This was conceived at Stanford and has an impressive board of advisors which lends legitimacy to the project.
It will prompt students to sign up in order to save their progress, but it is not necessary. Students under 13 are able to sign up without an email address. Encourage them to use a nickname for a username.
Websites worth sharing: Prodigy games and Sumdog
Many math skills require practice in order to develop fluency. I found a couple of websites that are engaging, tied to the Common Core and help develop skills. Both allow for differentiation and have a fun component that allows kids to reinforce skills while having fun.
Prodigy: In Prodigy, an adaptive math-practice game set in a role-playing universe, students customize colorful, avatars and send them off to the Wizard Academy to prepare for battle. Students’ characters travel the world; they chat with other wizards through a series of pre-written chat comments, challenge friends to fight in the arena, and brave the woods to take on monsters. Their characters progress as they do learning new spells to use against enemies. Teachers create an account and then have students join their classroom with a code. It starts with a placement test and is adaptive so it’s a good tool for differentiation.
https://www.prodigygame.com/ .
Sumdog: Sumdog lets kids play math games against their other students. You have the flexibility to choose from many different games to practice the same skill; skills include arithmetic, fractions, decimals, percentages, equations, and money. Games stay the same, but the questions within them change based on teacher selections and student progress. Teachers login so they can create accounts for students (no student email needed.) They can then monitor progress and assign skills. There are premium features available, but there is still a lot that can be done with the free version.