Friday, August 24, 2012

Review Manga High


Website – App Review

Name

Mangahigh
A manga is a Japanese cartoon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manga

Address

Grade Level

Kindergarten to high school

Subject

Math

Purpose

RTI – Practice - New Skills

Standards

Can choose activities or goals by standards

Admin

Can choose to use generic students and accounts
Can choose to upload student information – students have personal account to measure growth and collect badges
Can create graphs of student achievement and growth – exportable to excel

Age requirements

13 or permission from parents or school
TOS
By submitting any material to the content to the Mangahigh Service, you:
1.            are representing that you are fully entitled to do so;
2.            grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, non-terminable licence to copy, modify, distribute, show in public and create derivative works from that material in any form, anywhere; and
3.            authorise us to adapt the relevant material in the course of doing so, and so waive your moral rights to object to any derogatory treatment, or to be identified as the author, of the material in question.
Or basically they can use your pictures or stuff in any way they please as long as they please.

Cost

Free for US schools, may include outside advertising.

Other thoughts

When students log in they only show three challenges on first page, at the bottom of the page are secret quests that charge money and it can be difficult to get out the subscription page. (There is no exit or cancel, you must back up)

The analytics are pretty simple.

I think the games are great. For example in a game for younger students, finding sums up to 100, they sometimes asked which expressions equaled 100, of the three expressions sometimes they had one right answer and sometimes there were two.

I rushed through the starting page right away as most students would, but still figured out most of the games. 

If you stop for a second and ask for some help there are some pretty decent help screens, but I don't know how well they would actually teach. 



As we move into the upper grades it seems the math is less of a skill to be learned but a tool needed to solve the game. The math often depends more on visual senses than calculating math. This is a great way to get the need for math without the boredom of actually calculating a lot of math. Though yes there are games will require students to do some calculations. If the students have no idea what they are supposed to do the math help is a great tool for what math they should use, but not very good on how to figure out the game. They should go back to the beginning and figure that out themselves. 


After finishing one challenge there is a wait before they can go on to the next challenge. Students are encouraged to click and join a quest so they don't have to wait. I hate to ask students to buy something during the middle of class.

Screen shots taken from magnahigh.com on August 24, 2012.
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