How This 3rd Grade Teacher Saw Student Motivation Skyrocket

"[Boddle] has changed the dynamic of my class."

Elizabeth Capizzano is a 3rd grade teacher at a K-5th grade elementary school in south suburban Chicago. Building a positive classroom community for her students is of the utmost importance to Elizabeth, and as a result her students feel safe and cared for within the walls of her classroom. Elizabeth creates student-centered activities for her young scholars that encourage them to take ownership over their learning, which helps them stay motivated to learn new skills and concepts. With 70% of her school's students coming from low-income families, Elizabeth supports a diverse group of students with widely varying skill levels, which is made infinitely more challenging by the lack of parental support she has experienced. As such, Elizabeth has found Boddle to be a treasured resource that her students can easily utilize at home.

Key Outcomes:

• ‍Increased Student Motivation Without Full Parental Support
• A Reliable Resource that Teachers Can Count On to Close Learning Gaps and Increase Test Scores

Challenge: Elizabeth deals with an issue in education that many teachers are all too familiar with - a lack of parental support for some of her students. In addition to being a huge bummer, this issue creates many problems such as ensuring extra practice is enforced at home (when needed), communication from teachers not being received at home, and educators having to operate within a vacuum.

As a veteran teacher with over 10 years of experience teaching multiple grade levels from lower elementary up through middle school, Elizabeth is fully versed in just how widely varied students' skill levels and needs are. In addition, it can be extremely challenging and disheartening to create and plan differentiated assignments to meet the specific needs of her students only to be met with low student motivation and lack of support and communication from families at home.

Solution: Short of waving a magic wand to elicit parent engagement and improve student motivation (as awesome as that would be), Elizabeth tags Boddle in to help motivate her students with entertaining game play that doesn't feel like learning even though it most certainly is.

Because Elizabeth ensures that she creates and maintains a student-centered, inclusive, and joyful classroom environment, she is able to use Boddle to increase her students' motivation to practice their math skills. Until students feel a sense of trust and inclusion with their teacher and classmates and until their social-emotional needs are being attended to, academic learning takes an unfortunate backseat. Happily, Elizabeth notes that "[e]ven when parent support is not fully there, students love to play Boddle which helps them with their math skills." Her students are engaged in interactive gameplay, and Elizabeth can feel confident knowing that they are happily motivated to learn while practicing their grade-level standards. Further, Elizabeth excitedly notes that "[t]hey do not know they are actually learning when they are on Boddle! It has changed the dynamic of my class [for the better]".

Result: Elizabeth has found that not only has Boddle helped to boost motivation amongst her 3rd graders, but its adaptive technology has filled learning gaps and increased test scores, regardless of parental engagement.

In our humble opinion, the best type of learning is joyful. Though it was undeniably challenging for her students to capture the motivation needed to exude joyful learning, Elizabeth found that Boddle is a natural addition to her classroom, coupled with her preexisting focus on inclusivity. Though increasing student motivation was her primary goal, Elizabeth has found that "[Boddle] also helps fill learning gaps due to COVID." The pandemic worked hard, but Boddle worked harder. Elizabeth goes on to say that "[her] scores of MAP (last year) improved drastically because of Boddle!"

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“Even without full parental engagement, students love to play Boddle which helps them with their math skills. They do not know they are actually learning when they are on Boddle! "

- Elizabeth Capizzano, 3rd Grade Teacher

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Devices

Boddle currently runs on desktops, laptops, and Chromebooks using Safari, Firefox, or Chrome browsers. The Boddle app for iPad, tablets, and mobile users is also available on the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.

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