Students playing Polymath need to complete math practice in order to progress in the game; the more math questions students complete, the more they unlock in Polymath, and the more exciting their islands get!
Polymath's adaptive learning algorithm personalizes what students practice each time they log in to the game. As students answer questions, Polymath learns about their strengths and weaknesses, any gaps in foundational topics, and combines this with their practice history to ensure that each student gets the practice that they need to grow.
You can use Polymath effectively in your classroom without ever setting your students content, however, sometimes you may want to set ****focus areas for your students, guiding their math practice towards specific topics - that’s where Polymath Tasks come in!
You can create a task by navigating to the ‘Tasks’ page within your Polymath account and then selecting “Create Task”.
When you create a task you can select the topic(s) you want to focus on, name your task, and select the students you’d like it to apply to.
n.b. Topics have a life-span of 1 week from the date of creation. This it to make sure that students who miss lessons, or log in to Polymath for a while, don’t get a backlog of tasks when they next play Polymath!
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Can’t find “Tasks”? Not all users have access yet! If you can’t see ‘Tasks’ in the sidebar and would like to have access, just email us at [email protected]
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Polymath game-play is powered by “brain-power”. Brain-power is the energy that students need to build, run, and generally interact with the Polymath world. Brain-power is earned by completing math questions, and your students are already doing this every time they play!
If you’ve assigned a task to your students, the next time they need brain-power your students will be given questions that relate to the topic(s) you set for them, rather than questions selected by our learning algorithm.
Each student will receive up to 20 topic-specific questions before we resume surfacing questions based on our learning algorithm.
Kids learn best when they are appropriately challenged by a topic - it’s not too hard, and not too easy. Polymath chooses questions for each student based on their ability level in the selected topic(s). If we have information suggesting that a topic is too challenging for a student, we will ask students questions from a supporting topic instead. Questions from these foundational topics are marked as ‘Foundational” within the task summary screen.
If you have students that are consistently being asked foundational questions rather than topic-specific questions, it indicates that they might need more support on this topic before practicing questions on it in Polymath.