What is DreamBox?

DreamBox is a digital math learning resource that students have to do at school. It's usually extra credit, but sometimes it's mandatory. The goal of DreamBox is to give students fun math lessons to do outside of school... but here's why it fails miserably.

Why It's Bad

One reason that DreamBox is bad is that it doesn't give you lessons at your math level. It often gives me lessons about order of operations, which I learned in 4th grade, while I'm doing 8th grade math in the classroom. It also has some questionable math. In one lesson, it gave me a division problem that seemed easy by itself to me. But when I typed in the original equation with the correct answer, it told me that I had the correct answer, but I had to use a smaller equation. This is not okay. If it's correct, it's correct, no matter how it's done. Also, when you get something wrong, instead of giving you useful tips, it just basically tells you "Oops! That's incorrect," and then underlines the question. That is not helpful at all! If someone gets a question incorrect, rereading the question to them won't help if their math was wrong. As well as this, the overall design and feel of DreamBox is very bad. It uses low quality drawings and animations that look like they were made in the 80s, which makes the site very unpleasant. The lessons also seem to try to be games meant for 2nd graders and under; they have pointless long animations that seem to drag on forever, they use cartoon-like elements and sound effects, and overall, it just feels very childish. Now for the voiceover. You either get a bland, monotone robot voice that speaks very slowly with lots of pauses, or if you're really unlucky, you get stuck with some girl popping up on the screen talking in an annoying high-pitched voice. Finally, the site glitches out so much! It often lags, and sometimes it just freezes up. I've also seen it mark a correct answer incorrect, and vice-versa. All of these bad things about DreamBox combined with the unbearable length of some of the lessons makes doing DreamBox unpleasant, frustrating, annoying, and it has given me headaches!

Possible Solutions

One solution for this is using something else to substitute DreamBox. Maybe there could be a weekly packet of extra work to give you extra credit, on paper or Google classroom. It could have a few review questions from previous topics, but mostly focus on the current topic. In my opinion, this would be much better than DreamBox. But, probably the best solution is just to scrap the whole idea. Why should students be doing this as well as other math homework?

In a nutshell, DreamBox is a very bad math resource that we need to do something about.