Prodigy Math and math practice standards: what it teaches

Prodigy Math teaches the math content standards for grades 1 to 8, and it also gives children practice in the 8 Standards for Mathematical Practice, the habits of thinking that sit behind the Common Core. The short answer is that the game covers the what of school math directly, through over 1,400 adaptive skills, and it exercises the how, the problem solving habits, through the way its questions are built. It does not teach those habits explicitly, and it does not grade written reasoning, so it works best when a parent or teacher talks through the thinking as well.

Two kinds of standards

When people say Prodigy is aligned to the standards, they usually mean the content standards: the list of math topics a child should learn at each grade, from addition and subtraction in the early grades to ratios, expressions and functions by grade 8. Prodigy maps its questions to these standards, and to state standards where they differ, so the practice your child gets matches what their grade is supposed to cover. The full skill list is laid out in Prodigy Math Skills Overview, and the grade by grade breakdown is in Prodigy Grades Overview, Grades 1 to 8.

The second kind is the Standards for Mathematical Practice. These are not topics but habits: how a good mathematician thinks when faced with a problem. There are eight of them, and they apply at every grade. A child can know the content and still be weak in the practices, for example by guessing instead of checking, or by giving up on a hard problem instead of trying a new approach. Prodigy exercises several of these habits in play, which is one reason it feels more useful than a plain worksheet.

The 8 practice standards in Prodigy

Here is each practice standard, and what it looks like inside the game:

• Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them. Battle questions do not always have an obvious first step, and the game lets a child try, fail and try again without a red mark. That retry loop is the closest the game comes to teaching perseverance.
• Reason abstractly and quantitatively. Many questions ask a child to work with numbers and symbols, then connect the answer back to the game situation, for example working out how much gold a purchase leaves them with.
• Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others. This is the weakest fit. The game asks for answers, not explanations, so a child never has to argue for a method or spot a mistake in someone else’s working.
• Model with mathematics. Word problems inside battles ask children to turn a story into numbers, choose an operation and solve it, which is modelling in its simplest form.
• Use appropriate tools strategically. The game offers hints and shows the working after a wrong answer, and choosing when to use a hint is itself a small strategic decision.
• Attend to precision. Answers must be exact. A child who rushes and misreads a number gets the question wrong, which trains careful reading more reliably than a parent saying “be careful”.
• Look for and make use of structure. Repeated question types, for example the same pattern with different numbers, teach children to recognise a structure and reuse a method instead of starting from scratch each time.
• Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning. The adaptive system repeats skills until they are mastered, seven correct answers in a row, so a child sees the same idea in different forms and learns to spot the shortcut.

The honest summary is that Prodigy is strong on the first, fourth, sixth, seventh and eighth practices, and weak on the third, because explaining reasoning needs a person, not a game. If you want the full set, pair the game with a few minutes of talking: ask your child to explain how they solved a question, or to find the mistake in a wrong answer.

What the dashboard shows

Parents and teachers can see the standards coverage in the dashboards. The parent dashboard shows curriculum progress as a percentage per grade, the skills a child is working on, and a monthly report card with a skill by skill breakdown. The teacher dashboard goes further, with assignments tied to specific skills and reports on which standards the class is struggling with. That makes it possible to check whether a child is actually covering the grade’s standards, rather than just playing a lot.

A placement test sets the starting grade level when a child first plays, so the standards they meet are the ones for their level, not a fixed grade. If the test places them too low or too high, the questions adapt as they answer, and with a membership a parent can change the grade level directly. Prodigy placement test explained covers how the test works and what to do if the result looks wrong.

What Prodigy does not teach

Three gaps are worth knowing. First, the game does not teach a new topic from scratch: it practises skills a child has already met, so new ideas still need a lesson, a book or a teacher. Second, it never asks for written working, so a child can guess the right answer without understanding it, and the game cannot tell the difference. Third, it does not teach children to discuss math with each other, which is a real part of the practice standards in a classroom.

None of that makes the game a bad tool. It makes it a practice tool. Used that way, with a parent or teacher checking the dashboard and talking through the thinking, it covers the content standards well and gives real exercise to most of the practice standards.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides

• Prodigy Math Skills Overview
• Prodigy Grades Overview, Grades 1 to 8
• Prodigy placement test explained

This site is an independent guide. It is not the official Prodigy site, and it is not affiliated with Prodigy Education.