Designing Personalized Learning Products for Middle School Mathematics: The Case for Networked Learning Games

Abstract

Middle school mathematics education is subject to ongoing reform based on advances in digital instructional technologies, especially learning games, leading to recent calls for investment in personalized learning. Through an extensive literature review, this investigation identified three priority areas that should be taken into account when adopting learning games for the classroom: providing students with personalized feedback, assessing student learning, and promoting deeper learning. Demonstrating how The CandyFactory App can be harnessed to support personalized learning by collecting data from these three priority areas, we intend to make a case for how school decision-makers (supervisors, principals, and teachers) can decide which learning tools to use to best help students have personalized learning experiences. Through a series of three participatory design workshops, partnering teachers ( n = 6) confirmed that these data areas, which help to define personalized learning, are key to implementing successfully learning games in the classroom.