One afternoon earlier this year, an 11-year-old boy sat at his laptop, supposedly doing math homework. When his parent glanced at the screen, there were no equations in sight. Instead, the kid was controlling a monster in battle, casting magic spells. It turned out his fifth-grade math teacher had assigned time on Prodigy, a site that looks and feels like a video game. Prodigy surfaces multiple-choice questions between cartoon-monster attacks. Correctly identify an isosceles triangle or the square root of 49, and your "Aquadile" or "Bonasaur" - barely veiled Pokémon rip-offs - gets a health boost.
Prodigy is among a bevy of gamified tools - including Blooket, Gimkit, and Kahoot - that have gained a foothold in classrooms by promising to make learning fun. As Prodigy's website puts it: "Kids no longer have to choose between homework and playtime." Teachers can track which questions kids get right and wrong. But in about 10 minutes of gameplay, the boy spent less than 30 seconds answering math questions. When he got one wrong, the game didn't pause to diagnose his error. The only time he slowed down was when Prodigy forced him to watch ads for its paid-membership plans. (Prodigy did not respond to a request for comment.)
Other ed-tech games lean into gaming more than learning. Gimkit lobs occasional multiple-choice questions in the middle of live multiplayer games resembling Among Us and Only Up. Blooket offers a single-player game similar to Plants vs. Zombies for homework and live classroom games like Gold Quest. While parents fret over MrBeast videos during social-studies class, schools have embraced software indistinguishable from Candy Crush. These free-to-play platforms, aided by school-issued Chromebooks and pandemic-era tech incursion, have become a staple of daily lessons. For kids who attended kindergarten on Zoom, an ed-tech-mediated school experience is all they know.
Some platforms are so compelling that students play them in their spare time. Blooket has a gambling-like feature: Players earn in-game currency to spend on packs offering a slim chance at rare avatars, or "Blooks." The site spawned a cottage industry of YouTube streamers sharing hacks and posting screen recordings of lucky "pulls." "Oh my God, we pulled it," one popular YouTuber raves in a video with nearly half a million views. "One of, if not the, rarest Blooks in the game."
Ben Stewart, who co-founded Blooket as a high-school student in 2018, told me the company now has about 20 employees, millions of active users (he wouldn't say how many), and 23 game modes. He understands qualms about addictive mechanics but argues Blooket is designed to replace flash cards, not lectures. "In our mind, if you're using Blooket for an hour in a class, something has gone wrong," he said. Blooket aims to surface questions every 20 seconds and limits daily rewards (though players can spend money for more).
Several teachers agreed these tools are best in small doses. Mashfiq Ahmed, a high-school chemistry teacher in New York City, uses Blooket and Kahoot for end-of-unit reviews and substitute filler. Ed-tech games also keep early finishers quiet. "Sometimes teachers need things like this to get through the day," said Jason Saiter, a high-school teacher in Dublin, Ohio. But things get out of hand. Students can create quizzes where any answer is correct, and browser extensions auto-answer every question. "Kids are creative," Stewart said with a grimace. "They try to cheat our games as many ways as they possibly can."
Districts have enacted phone bans and blocked YouTube and Roblox, but that doesn't solve the deeper problem: Software has eaten the American school. Some parents want to go further. Jodi Carreon, a mother in San Marcos, California, said her second-grader begged her to pay for Prodigy's premium service and then got distracted playing it in class. "I'm like, 'You literally handed them this,'" she said. Carreon is now national-expansion director for Schools Beyond Screens, a parent group that pushed Los Angeles to become the first major U.S. school district to adopt sweeping restrictions on laptop and tablet use in classrooms.
Other experts argue the problem isn't games per se but thoughtless use. Jan Plass, a professor of digital media and learning sciences at NYU, cited Immune Attack, a 2008 game where players navigate a nanobot through a patient's bloodstream to fight infections. He contrasted that with Prodigy, which bolts multiple-choice questions onto unrelated game templates. It's lazy but cheap, accessible, and dovetails with a system geared toward standardized tests. Screen time has become a default rather than an intentional choice. When the author first saw his son playing Prodigy, the kid had clicked the wrong lesson - the screen flashed addition problems instead of the fraction division he was supposed to be learning.