Why do so many people love the Dragonbox Big Numbers app?

I thought the original Dragonbox Numbers was an amazing app. We got it for Chickpea when she was around 4.5, and she played it happily on and off until our iPad broke when she was maybe 6? On the Dragonbox website it says it’s for kids age 4 through 8, but I think for Chickpea by age 6 she was starting to outgrow it.

Now we are all stuck at home quarantining with Covid, and I thought maybe it made sense to try the next Dragonbox app: Dragonbox Big Numbers. Chickpea has been playing it for a few days now and I am much less impressed with it than I was with the original Dragonbox Numbers game.

Unlike the original game, Dragonbox Big Numbers is a resource management game, where you are trying to accumulate certain resources but trading certain resources for other resources. Although the math seems less integral to the game than to the original Dragonbox Numbers app, I do like that the math in the game is not merely gamification. The math is not merely window-dressing or hoops you have to jump through to get to the next level. The math is integrally tied to the gameplay. Rae Shio in the “Living Room Math” Facebook group says “The focus is on addition and subtraction, both with and without regrouping. The game cleverly demonstrates and reinforces place value during the regrouping phase (showing that 1 ten is a bundle of 10 ones, for example), and the collection and trade of resources exposes kids to multiples and ratio.”

Still, I feel like much of the time playing the game is spent in simply waiting or in engaging in tedious repetitive clicking, which serves no purpose. Really, there is a *lot* of mindless clicking.

Ostensibly the game is meant to teach the algorithm for long addition and long subtraction to kids, but first of all if the game is really targeted at 4 to 8 year olds, then isn’t that much too soon to be teaching this algorithm? I worry that it will lead to kids just applying an algorithm by rote before they actually understand how to add and subtract large numbers. I would think that kids should be able to add and subtract big numbers first just using their basic number sense before learning the standard algorithm. I couldn’t find much online supporting this view, but I did find Rae Shio and Tracy Zagor, an educator of math educators, making the same critique. I would say that even if a 4-year-old can technically play this game, it is definitely not appropriate for a 4-year-old, and probably many 6-year-olds will still not be able to use their number sense to handle big numbers, and so it would be inappropriate for them as well. Maybe a better age range is 7 to 9?

Secondly, the game doesn’t actually seem to teach the standard algorithm for long addition and subtraction. I’ve been watching Chickpea playing the game and even though she’s pretty far along and adding and subtracting numbers in the thousands, she’s still just doing the math in her head, and entering the answers from left to right. She does not seem to have picked up at all on the standard algorithm. Now I realize complaining about this is like complaining that not only is the food bad, but the portions are too small. Still, if the point of the app is to teach the standard algorithm, shouldn’t it actually *teach* it?

Tracy Zagor has an interesting blog post about the minimum, non-negotiable criteria she has for a good “fact-based” app. She argues that apps should have no time pressure, and on that dimension Dragonbox Big Numbers (DBN) gets a big check. Her second criteria is that the app has a conceptual basis for the operations. Again, DBN does pretty well in this regards. It shows a pretty concrete, visual representation of the numbers that are being added and subtracted, and how 10 bundles of 10 apples turn into one bundle of 100 apples, for example. And it shows how when you subtract a number you might have to unbundle a 100 to get more tens. Her third criteria is that mistakes are handled productively. As far as I can tell Dragonbox Big Numbers doesn’t handle mistakes well at all. First of all, Chickpea usually can’t tell if the app just didn’t recognize her handwriting or if she actually did the math wrong. Once she figures out that the math was wrong it doesn’t actually help her in any way to see what she did wrong. So out of Tracy’s 3 “essential” criteria I would say that DBN gets 2 out of 3 stars. Of course, there are other important criteria as well. For example, the game has to be engaging, otherwise what’s the point? On that criteria DBN does great. Chickpea is obsessed with the resource collection goal and happily keeps playing despite the fact that the gameplay itself is pretty mind-numbingly dull.

I tried to see how other people felt about this app, and almost all the reviews I read were extremely positive. Odd. The only thing I could find online criticizing the app (other than that it teaches the standard algorithm too soon) was on this WellTrainedMind forum. One commenter says “This is, by far, their weakest in terms of math content. This app will NOT teach regrouping, you’ve got to have an idea of what’s going on beforehand.  And once you kind of figure out the game play… you are not actually “doing” the math.  You’re just swiping your finger around until you’ve bundled up ten (no counting, the computer does it for you) then moving it over.” Another commenter says “Numbers starts with establishing some of the real basics of number sense and works its way up from there.  Big Numbers really only trains the addition and subtraction algorithm.”

So in conclusion I would say that if you need something to occupy your kid and you don’t mind them doing something mostly mindless but with a little bit of addition and subtraction practice, and they can already add and subtract large numbers in their head, then this is a reasonable game. But otherwise I’d skip it.