In Sussex Elementary School, colorful wristbands set apart the students that do well in math. Their names appear on a wall, and you'll hear them on the morning announcements.

These students play an online math game called First in Math, and they're having a blast doing it, their principal says. The rewards and recognition help extrinsically motivate the kids, but Principal Tom Bowser said they're to a point where they intrinsically motivate themselves.

The game allows them to compete against other students in Baltimore County Public Schools, and the students from the Title I school are sitting in first place above the district's typical high-achieving schools.

Playing math games has changed the culture of this school.

“We now have kids walking around with all these bands on their arms," Bowser said, "and now it’s a cool thing to be academically achieving.”

In various schools and districts across North America, online games are motivating students to learn, teaching them math skills, and encouraging problem-solving.

Games motivate students to learn

Sussex Elementary students get excited about competing against other schools and in turn, get excited about learning. When the school first started the program last year, a little boy went home and accessed the game. He was the first one in the school to achieve a level, and he was so excited that he came back to school that day to get his wristband.

Rather than math being this thing that they have to do, the game motivates them, and math becomes something they want to do. "They’re enjoying it, and thus it’s increasing their basic math facts so that when they go to do a math problem, it’s easier for them,” Bowser said.

In 2009, the school's students were 69.8 percent proficient and advanced in math. But in 2010, that percentage jumped to 94.3.

“We were doing other things as well, so I’m not going to contribute that total jump to just First in Math or the use of math games," Bowser said. "But we really think that this has had a major impact on our kids’ willingness and desire to do math.”

The fourth-graders in Cara Whitehead's class at Carlisle Elementary School in Boaz, Ala., learn through a combination of their teacher's instruction, a software-based individualized learning program and online games from different websites.

“They’re just highly motivational," Whitehead said. "It doesn’t matter what you tell a kid to do; if they can do it on a computer, they’re happy.”

With a set of iPads in class, 22 fifth-grade math students in the gifted and talented program at Berthoud Elementary School in Colorado learn through a number of game apps. While the iPad's lack of support for Flash prevents them from playing many games, G/T Specialist and Technology Trainer Diane McInturff still finds math games for them to play.

Between the iPads and her iPhone and iTouch, the kids have a 2-1 ratio of students to devices. And on those devices, they play two of their favorite games, Bismarck and SET, which are based off two physical games. With the battleship game Bismarck, they break up into teams and play another team on the same Wi-Fi network in the building.

“They love the competition," McInturff said. "These are bright kids, so they’ll go home and figure out the game and get good at it and want to beat someone, usually me.”

The games give students a more engaging and in-depth learning experience than some of the more traditional methods.

Games provide fluency practice in a fun way

Baltimore County Public Schools is located in the middle of the second largest site in the country for gaming companies: Hunt Valley. High school students in the district have been competing to develop math and science games, and the superintendent has set aside money to work on gaming development.

Students at Sussex Elementary School show off the wristbands they earned from leveling up in a math game. Photo courtesy of Tom Bowser

“This is the way our kids are learning these days," said Pat Baltzley, director of mathematics pre-K-12, "so we need to be able to involve them in these games.”

At the elementary level, the district primarily uses an online program called First in Math as well as its physical counterpart the 24 Challenge. In the first year of using the online program, a number of schools reported that their math proficiency percentages went up, Baltzley said.

“The students become very fluent in facts," Baltzley said, "and that’s really one of the major reasons for doing the game.”

In addition to First in Math, the district uses FASTT Math and Go Solve. This year, it's piloting Fraction Nation as well.

At the middle school level the schools use Lure of the Labyrinth, a game that the district worked with Maryland Public Television to design. This game has a story line, which is the direction the district would like their games to move in.

The games it uses now are practice games that the kids find exciting because they can compete against each other. But with a story line like the one in the Lure of the Labyrinth, the kids have to go through a labyrinth and solve challenges to reach the next level.

Students don't just play games at school either. Last year when the district piloted First in Math, the students couldn't come to school for eight days during a two-week stretch of heavy snowfall.

When Baltzley looked at how much students had used the game at the end of the year, she noticed a spike during that time. 

Even though they didn't have school, the students actually played math games to pass the time. 

Games allow students to manipulate numbers

In education, we've sold games as learning games, said John SanGiovanni, instructional facilitator of elementary mathematics in the Howard County Public School System in Maryland. But most of those games give students practice. They don't actually teach them.

That's not the case with DreamBox Learning, a Web-based math game for students from kindergarten through third grade.

“The games are not only engaging and motivating, but they are in line with the way we want kids to be taught,” SanGiovanni said.

One of the games helps them learn how to easily add and subtract using "friendly" numbers. For example, 68 + 87 is not an easy number to do in your head.

In this game, each number sits in a bucket. The students can take 2 away from 87 and add that to the bucket with 68. Now they have one bucket of 70 and one of 85. Those numbers are much easier to add.

"They get to practice," SanGiovanni said, "but it also shows them what they’re doing.”

Games change the way kids engage with math content

At the Center for Research on Learning and Technology in Indiana University's School of Education, Melissa Gresalfi studies immersive video games where there's some sort of narrative, not games designed for skill practice. Her research has shown a few things: 

1. The least surprising result: Putting math in a game context really increases kids' interests in what they're doing.

2. A more interesting result: Games can change the ways that kids engage with math content.

“Kids who play video games know that failure is expected," Gresalfi said, "and there’s nothing problematic about it, and in fact anything that you can do right away on your first try is probably not that valuable to begin with because the things that really help you to level up are the things that require multiple tries.”

And that's how math is in the real world. It's hard and requires collaboration and revision.

Video games also push back on student's thinking about math. She works on Quest Atlantis, an immersive video game developed by the center that combines a virtual world with a narrative. She shared an example about how a statistics unit pushes back on student's thinking.

In the unit, two candidates in this virtual world are running for mayor. They both use the same data, but make opposite recommendations for the city. So the students have to figure out if someone's lying and who they should trust.

They find out that both candidates are telling the truth, but they're using different tools to do so. One might use the median of the data while another might use the range. And each of these methods reveals a different result.

That's not a message that students often get. Once they analyze the data, then they start to wonder what the tool reveals about the data and whether the outcome was what they thought would happen.

“What they’re doing mathematically actually has an impact on the virtual world that they’re engaged in," Gresalfi said, "and it really helps broaden their understanding of mathematical content because it’s not just looking at numbers to see ‘Is your answer right or wrong?’ But it’s looking at the implications of the decisions on a design space, which is a much richer kind of feedback.”

These kinds of games help students solve problems, while other types of games give students practice with procedures. And when you're designing a game, you should base it on how you think someone will learn and what you want kids to be able to do.

You can't solve problems well without understanding the procedures, but you can understand the procedures without becoming a good problem-solver, Gresalfi said. In her opinion, problem-solving gives better value for the money, but is more difficult to do.

“Both kinds of games can accomplish the goals for which they were designed. The question is, ‘Which goal do you have in mind?’ And I think many of us want kids to be able to think, not just replicate.”

Games foster transformative play

About 2 1/2 years ago, Gord Holden started using Quest Atlantis with his distance learning students at North Island Distributed Education School in British Columbia, Canada. Now he has 35 students spread out over several hundred miles. He meets with some of them in his office and talks with other students over Skype for various reasons, whether they're traveling, sick or victims of bullying. Some kids also have autistic tendencies.

Their response to the game has been incredible. The transformative play that the game allows has changed one boy's response to school from a tantrum to asking to go to school more. One student was so shy that she wouldn't even talk to Holden, but that changed when the student took on the form of an avatar in the game.

These students don't even have to play the game as part of their distance learning class, but they do anyway because they can create solutions to some major problems in their virtual world.

While the game doesn't have a lot of math material now, the material they do use refers to statistics. In Crypto Jungle, they learn about Cartesian planes. They go to an island to rescue a professor in charge of an archeological dig, work with an archeological team and use the Cartesian plane to locate artifacts.

Once they locate the artifacts, they have to figure out whether they can remove the artifacts or whether they belong to the island or its residents. Everything's complicated, and throughout the activities, they use numbers to resolve a problem or deal with a dilemma.

"Kids forget numbers," Holden said, "but they don’t forget stories.”

Each dilemma they face doesn't necessarily have a right or wrong answer. And each answer brings its own consequences.

"So what happens is math becomes part of your life and how you see things and how you interpret things rather than just a function of a calculator,” Holden said.

In a new activity, a golden eagle has been hurt and found by a hiker. The students have to figure out the dilemma of how to get the eagle out and back again as quickly as possible. There's a combination of roads, hiking and other solutions. In the end, you have to find the best solution, and they warn you there's no right solution. 

Holden grew up thinking that math problems have a right solution. He changed his mind when he started marking some of his students' work. They had other solutions that he hadn't thought of before, and they would have gotten the bird back faster than him.

“I was using math, just math," Holden said. "They were using math and thinking outside the box ’cause they no longer see math as just numbers, but as part of a process of solving problems.”