How This Brooklyn Tutor Transformed Remote Math into a Collaborative Learning Experience Using Boddle

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Liz Quinones is a mental health counselor to families in Brooklyn, NY, and also a private tutor for children from 3 - 7 years of age. She needed a better way to adapt to online learning with her math students and also wanted to be able to identify when her students needed help on a specific topic. After using Boddle, she has found her students to not only be more engaged but also enjoy the games in Boddle, which makes it easier for her to plan her math curriculum.

Key Outcomes:

• Increased engagement: Fun and interactive gameplay lead to increased engagement and help address the challenge of keeping children with short attention spans consistently and actively learning even within a remote setting.
• Fun remote collaboration in math: Liz can better take charge of the learning process by sharing her screen and working collaboratively with students. When students get stuck she pauses the game and goes over the topic.
• Time saved: Workflow is seamless and time-efficient, as Boddle’s extensive content serves as an effective guide for teachers to create targeted lesson plans.

Challenge: Finding a math tool that could keep her students’ attention during remote learning and allow them to collaborate in learning

Liz had been searching for engaging math tools for the students she tutored remotely, and while there was a good selection of literacy/reading tools, she had to dig a little more to find a math tool that would capture her students’ attention during remote learning. Through continued searches, she landed on Boddle. Generally, teachers already face the challenge of working with children who are physiologically inclined to have shortened attention spans. The remote learning setting has exacerbated this challenge further, as the amount of possible distractions increases while students learn from home. Teachers must now cope with the increased difficulty of engaging students and figuring out effective solutions despite having less control over the classroom due to physical separation, technological barriers, and the lack of a dedicated learning space for many students while remote learning.

Solution: A collaborative and fun math game where she incorporates her math lessons into the game to engage her students.

Using Boddle, Liz is able to both reference our content library to advise her lesson plans and integrate said lessons into the game that her students play and use to learn. Furthermore, she is able to share her screen and collaborate with her students live, as they go through the activities together, which gives a very similar vibe to an actual classroom; this also allows her to pause and elaborate on specific areas that her students struggle with on a real-time basis.

Result: Her students were not only experiencing a higher level of engagement but were also able to receive help on their weakest areas.

Despite the challenges of remote learning, Liz’s students are not only keeping up with their learning progress but are also advancing, as their engagement with math increases. With Boddle, these students are not simply having fun or learning separately; they are doing so in tandem with each other, which results in a very proactive and productive learning environment. Consequently, students find themselves better at acquiring and retaining new skills due to piqued interest and engagement. Even better, Liz stays in control of what types of math content is delivered to her students and has a wide library of skills to choose from.

“At first the thought of tutoring math to my young students through zoom seemed very daunting. When I found Boddle, I was able to use it as a guide for my lessons and a way to have fun remotely with my students. We worked together to answer questions, play games, and choose just the right outfits for our characters. They have so much fun on Boddle, I use it as a reward for hard work!”          - Liz Quinones

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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 will be available soon on iOS and Android!

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