For most people, March Madness means college basketball tournaments and and hoping your team makes it to the top. For the students at A G Richardson Elementary School their March Madness turned into March “Mathness” and the battle to see if their class can answer the most math questions correctly on Prodigy, a game-based learning platform.
Since January, Prodigy Education has been hosting the Prodigy State Challenge monthly contest. The challenge has participating schools in the state of Virginia competing against each other to see who can answer the most questions correctly in a month. Prodigy lead teachers Patrick Hallett, 5th grade, Nancy Sink, 3rd grade, and math specialist Candy Standley assisted staff in implementing the learning platform within their own classrooms.
Prodigy allows teachers to create assignments at each child’s level, building students’ confidence as mathematicians and allowing them to feel success with the math they are learning. For the first two months of the challenge, A G Richardson had ranked first in the state of Virginia, answering over 100,000 questions correctly within that time frame.
For the month of March, Sink created the Prodigy March “Mathness” brackets to have classes compete against each other. Twenty one classes, containing 455 students, began the battle to see if their class could be the best in the school. After three weeks and over 150,000 questions answered correctly, the top two classes will be competing in the last week of the challenge. Patrick Hallett’s fifth grade class will be challenging Danielle Aylor’s second grade class to see who will be the best of the best. As for the March results for the Prodigy State Challenge, A G Richardson will take first place again for the state of Virginia.
In May, Prodigy Education will be holding the Prodigy National Championship in which top schools from across the United States will compete. Schools ranked within the platinum level will have a chance to compete to win a technology grant of $100,000 for the school that comes in first place, $25,000 for second place, and $10,000 for schools that finish in third through eighth place.“Our goal is to be within the top five schools, “ shared Hallett. Currently A G Richardson Elementary is ranked within the platinum level.