reddragdiva | Sum-Thing maths games for 5yo schoolchildren in England.

So the school is giving Freda participatory homework, in the form of a maths board game each week to be played with a parent. Simple stuff like reading numbers, counting spaces moved, reading analogue clocks, reading instructions and so forth. I'm all for the idea.

The reality somewhat fails to measure up. A couple of the games have gratuitously frustrating bits in the middle (e.g. "go back to the red square" where you're likely to get it five or ten times in a row) that would have been spotted had anyone playtested these things even once. This week's literally does not make sense and requires a die that is simultaneously numbered and rolls red or black (the die included is only red or black); nobody has even bothered to make the instructions make sense. arkady will be complaining tomorrow. We try to patch up the instructions, but frustrating a five year old who wants to play the game is really inadequate.

Has anyone encountered these things? The line is called Sum-Thing and appear to be produced by Carwarden House Community School. (The "acknowldgments" on the back of the boards has had similar attention paid to typos.)

Update: The teachers were horrified and actually started playtesting the games themselves. Excellent result! This will of course only encourage us to continue being the acerbic parents of the bright kid. Frankly, Freda's classmates are enough like her that we think her teachers deserve medals, and have told them so.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

bohemiancoast

Hey, is Freda at Henry Maynard? Because we were given awful shitty homework exactly like this, and every week we'd dutifully fill in the little feedback form saying 'THIS IS A ROTTEN GAME DO YOU PEOPLE HAVE NO UNDERSTANDING OF GAME THEORY' until eventually we realised that actually they didn't have any interest at all in the actual *game* of it and we just went back to playing proper games with our kids, both of whom have (and had) maths skills coming out the wazoo.

It's not just educational games either. I once blogged in high dudgeon about an actual marketed game product for kids that was unplayably bad and could not possibly have been playtested. And got email from the sweet lady who ran the company saying 'do you have any idea how hard it is to run a small games company?' And of course the answer to that is 'yes' and I have felt guilty about it ever since. But the game was still awful and unplayable. The point is, I think, that this really doesn't matter in the way that geeks think it does, because most people don't seriously try to play by the rules or care much whether they work or not -- the purpose of the game is to interact as a family, rather than to grok the game.

reddragdiva

A couple of the games have actually been good - the clock one was good. We're dealing with it by expecting more at them and making sure Freda learns something anyway.

I would not feel bad about it. "Do you know how hard it is to do basic playtesting OH LOOK IT ISN'T."