As a 4th grade math teacher, I was always looking for fun and engaging ways for my students to practice the skills they were learning in class.  I would spend hours searching online for games that I could put up on my interactive whiteboard to break up the usual classroom routine. When I discovered Mangahigh, my search was over!

What is Mangahigh?

Mangahigh (www.mangahigh.com) is a free, games-based learning website where students between the ages of 7-16 can practice a variety of mathematical concepts.  What makes this site so different from others is that each game is aligned to a standard and is designed to adapt in difficulty according to the ability of the student playing.  Each individual student can work at a level where they are comfortable and still be appropriately challenged.

How to get started

Visit www.mangahigh.com, then enter your school’s name to begin creating your free account.  You will be redirected a form to fill in some personal information as seen below. At the bottom of the form, you will be able to choose what curriculum you use. Go ahead and activate your account. That’s it!

Creating your class

Another great feature of Mangahigh is that you can create individual logins for your students without an e-mail address, making it perfect for students under the age of 13. After you activate your account, you will be redirected to another page that prompts you to create a class roster. There are 3 options for adding students. Choose whatever you feel most comfortable with.

Once all your student names have been submitted,  they are automatically assigned a backup user ID and password. As the teacher, you can edit student information or reset passwords whenever necessary.  You can even print out the login information for all the students with the click of a button! Students can attach this print out to their folders or notebook, so you never have to worry about them forgetting their login information.

Challenges

Now you’re ready to take full advantage of the Mangahigh website! Simply go to the classes tab at the top of the page and select the class you’d like to assign a game challenge. You will be prompted to choose a default grade for your class, but you will still have access to other grade level games.  

Tracking progress

But wait … there’s more! Upon activating your account, you are given a free 60 day trial period of paid membership to the site. Paid membership allows you to set challenges to individual students, allows students to access their own analytics and automatically provides students with study recommendations, in addition to the full analytics.

As nice as these features are, you can still access full class analytics with the free membership. Students high scores on each game are available for free along with the amount of time it took them to reach that high score. You can even view which students completed challenges, who passed and who failed.

In my experience, students really enjoyed the games and quizzes on Mangahigh and were motivated to beat each other’s high scores.  Not only did I use the games on my interactive whiteboard in class, but I also assigned challenges as homework and extra credit. Mangahigh can be used in a variety of ways to challenge students and assess their progress with math skills.  Its ease of use and vast collection of engaging activities make Mangahigh a math teacher’s dream resource!  How will you use Mangahigh in your classroom?!