While the game is given to schools free for students to play in a restricted mode with only their classmates, when children play the unrestricted version of the game at home, they receive regular reminders and messages encouraging them to become members, which costs $59.88 to $107.40 per child per year. Prodigy said that more than 90,000 schools globally - two thirds of them in the United States and the rest mostly in Canada, Australia and India - have used it to assign math homework. The game has been downloaded more than 7.3 million times in North America since the start of 2019, according to the app researcher App Annie.
Prodigy is a role-playing game aimed at first through eighth graders where players create customized wizard characters that enter “battles” to earn stars and prizes for solving curriculum-aligned math problems. The Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, a nonprofit advocacy group, on Friday accused a popular math game used in thousands of elementary schools of using “deceptive marketing and manipulative tactics” in a letter of complaint to the Federal Trade Commission.
