DragonBox

SUMMARY

DragonBox is a math learning app created by math teacher, Jean-Baptiste, and cognitive scientist, Patrick Marchal.

DragonBox 12+ (DB) is an award-winning, popular educational app that involves high school level algebra concepts by using motion and animated characters to practice algebra. In this game, students can move pictures and symbols in a way that resembles the rules of algebra, and isolate a box that contains a dragon (similar to isolating a variable in an equation).

DB introduces players to algebraic concepts through a discovery puzzle-based approach that embeds gestures, multiple representations, and immediate feedback. The content in DB aligns with the Common Core Standard and covers the following content: addition, multiplication, division, equivalence, negative numbers, variables, factoring, distribution, fractions, and parentheses.

Procedure

At each learning session, students spent 25 minutes working through DragonBox at their own pace, and 5 minutes answering questions on their DragonBox progress. Students opened the ASSISTments assignment for the day, recorded progress made on the previous session, then begin playing on DragonBox for the remainder of their session.

Layout: In this game, students can move pictures and symbols in a way that resembles the rules of algebra. There are 10 chapters in DragonBox and each chapter contains 20 problems. The goal of the game is to isolate the box containing a dragon to one side (hence the game's name) - which is equivalent to solving an equation for x.

Throughout the app, the pictures of dragons are gradually replaced by algebraic symbols. The cards represent math symbols and they follow math properties. Typically new concepts are introduced at the beginning through pictures, and students apply the concepts to the algebraic symbols as they work through the game.

Click to Download this PDF of Download instructions:

DB Download Instructions

Click to Download this PDF of Rules for Dragon box:

DB_rules_algebra.pdf

Research findings on DragonBox 12+

The developers of DB reported that DragonBox “secretly teaches algebra to your children!” and “83% of children learn the basics of algebra in an hour” (We Want To Know, 2014; Liu, 2012; Shapiro, 2013; www.dragon boxapp.com). Students from 70 schools across 15 districts reached an average mastery rate of 93% after only 1.5 hours of participation. In this study, mastery was determined by successfully answering three problems in a row that were designed to look like traditional algebra problems (ex. d*x+m=8) (Liu et al., 2015).

While DB has received public attention for its success in teaching math and increasing engagement, it is unclear whether the skills learned transfer to other math tasks, domains, or more distal assessments.

  • In one recent study, students who used DB 12+ had significantly higher scores in algebraic thinking and improved attitudes and engagement towards math compared to a control group (Siew, Goefrey, & Lee, 2016).

  • However, a second study with 267 middle school students, found that despite higher ratings of enjoyment of DB (d=0.51) compared to Lynnette (an intelligent tutoring system), students playing DB did not demonstrate greater earning gains compared to the ITS (Long & Aleven, 2014; 2017).

These mixed findings support Aleven’s (2017) conclusion that more rigorous studies are needed to test out-of-game transfer of learning in educational games compared to other forms of technology.