Mangahigh

Mangahigh is an online program that we use to support our children’s mathematical fluency and understanding of key concepts taught from Year R to 6.  It is an interactive game-based learning platform.  Our children access it in school as part of their daily fluency practice, during homework or Mangahigh club or at home as part of weekly assignments set for homework.

What is Game-Based Learning?

Game-Based Learning fuses computer games and academic subjects to provide a compelling and exciting supplement to traditional pedagogy. Many scientific studies have shown that students perform better with the help of Game-Based Learning.

Why do we use Mangahigh?

Mangahigh is proven to be effective for the following reasons:

• Adaptivity: Each game covers certain learning topics and is designed to dynamically adapt in difficulty to the ability of the student in order to aid the student to stay in their zone of proximal development i.e. "the level of difficulty that is neither too hard nor too easy, and is the level at which optimal learning takes place"(Renaissance Learning, 2007).

• Automaticity: "is the ability to do things without occupying the mind with the low level details required. It is usually the result of learning, repetition, and practice" (Wikipedia). All Mangahigh games have a meta-objective that the players strive to achieve by repeating a simple step (game mechanic) over and over again. By overlaying the game mechanic with the core learning concept, we've invented the new and more efficient way of learning for the new generation.

• Discipline and self-learning: Games develop students' ability and curiosity to observe, hypothesize, test, evaluate, conclude and refine ideas that are not always possible with traditional pedagogic teaching.

• Application of theory: The games provide powerful contexts that often bring out the 'real-world' application of the topic at hand, thereby increasing the students' interest in the content and encouraging them to explore further.

What do our children say?

Our children really enjoy using this program both at home and at school.  Feedback from a pupil voice survey shows that our children find it to be motivating, engaging and supportive as the questions adapt as they make progress. Some children did not like the pressure of the timer so we have changed the settings on some tasks to not include a timer.  We are very grateful to the PTA for funding this for this academic year. Thank you to parents who have provided feedback and this has been passed on to Mangahigh so they can continue to develop their program.   

As well as completing the task set by the class teacher on Mangahigh the children can access a range of games to support their fluency.  The children love the competitive element of working on a common goal to earn points to move up the school leaderboard.   The children celebrated success during maths week and collectively as a school we came 38th out of 333 schools across the country! A great achievement!