BrainPOP was founded in 1999 by Dr. Avraham Kadar as a creative way to explain difficult concepts to his young patients. Today, it serves as a trusted learning resource supporting core and supplemental subjects, reaching millions of learners worldwide. Expanding learning tools, and helping kids create, construct, and collaborate as they explore their world. Discover how BrainPop works using this training video.
Contribution to Education
This App is an essential engagement tool that allows both students and teachers to be involved in the learning process." "BrainPOP has really evolved by increasing the depth of knowledge needed to answer quiz questions, and playful assessments that allow students to explain their reasoning while playing a game."
There is limited free content, so to get the most benefit from this site consider trying the free trial subscription. If your kid likes BRAINPOP's format and content, purchase the subscription. Once kids choose a topic (such as history, math or health) and a video within that topic, they press play and watch the few minutes-long video. Each video is accompanied by interactive activities and quizzes that reinforce what kids have learned. GameUp offers unique games that explore concepts in math, science, health, and technology. Families can talk about any of the videos on BrainPop that pique your kid's interest, but especially those that are emotionally or intellectually challenging, such as those that address difficult times in history like war and terrorism, social problems, as well as personal health and physical development and videos that contain warnings about smoking cigarettes, drugs, and alcohol use.Talk about the different ways of learning. Do you remember more when you have an activity to do after watching a related video? Families can also talk about other educational sites that benefit learning and where to find sources.
Personal Review
BrainPop is a standard-bearer for quality, self-directed online educational content for older grade school-age kids. This interactive site includes videos, audio prompts, graphics, and games in a blended format that will be very familiar to most kids. Kids can spend hours on this site exploring many of the main topics that contain more sub-categories, like the science and math sections. There are some sensitive topics addressed here, such as war and terrorism, but kids are warned to get a parent or teacher to watch that video with them prior to clicking play. A year's subscription is worth it because there's at least a year's worth of content for a kid to explore on BrainPop. Most games are clever, creative, and address learning concepts not traditionally explored in this format, such as the Judicial Court where kids argue court cases at the Supreme Court. They also offer kids a really nice way to actively engage with the subject matter.
Research
A study assessed student performance by comparing BrainPOP® subscribers to non-subscribers using the results of statewide tests administered at the end of the 2015-2016 school year. BrainPOP’s Data and Analytics team, led by Dr. Kevin Miklasz, looked at results across five states (California, Colorado, Florida, New York, and Texas) and three core subjects areas (ELA, Math, and Science) for students in grades 3-8. The results of the study show that BrainPOP meets the Moderate Evidence of Impact level for ESSA. Another study was conducted by SEG Research, an independent educational research firm located in New Hope, Pennsylvania. SEG Research provides research, evaluation, and assessment services to educational publishers, educational technology providers, assessment service providers and government agencies. SEG has been meeting the research and assessment needs of organizations since 1979. This research was supported by a grant from BrainPOP. Students who were in classes that used BrainPOP showed substantial growth in Language, Reading Comprehension and Science and more moderate gains in Vocabulary during the course of the study. Students in classes using BrainPOP increased their SAT 10 scores between 11 and 24 points. Students received approximately 16-20 weeks of instruction using BrainPOP, yet the amount of growth achieved is equivalent to between one and two grade levels of growth when compared to the national norm group. Students enrolled in classrooms using BrainPOP achieved substantially greater gains in Science, Language, and Reading comprehension than students enrolled in classes that did not use BrainPOP. More moderate gains were also seen for Vocabulary. When controlling for students’ initial ability using analysis of covariance, BrainPOP users showed substantially greater gains in Reading Comprehension, Science and Language and moderately greater gains in Vocabulary than students in classes that did not use BrainPOP. BrainPOP users finished the year with scores that were 16 scalescore points higher in Reading Comprehension, 13 scale-score points higher in Science, 8 scalescore points higher in Language, and 5 points higher in Vocabulary than the Control Group on the SAT 10 assessments.
References
Paulo, J. R. (2012). BrainPOP. The Charleston Advisor, 14(1), 20-23.
Kadar, N., Kadar, N., Rowe, V. T. J., & Kadar, A. (2016). U.S. Patent No. 9,378,650. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Stamper, J., Lomas, D., Ching, D., Linch, K., & Ritter, S. (2012). Internet scale experimental design and deployment for educational games using BrainPOP. In Proceedings of the 8th Games+ Learning+ Society Conference (GLS 2012) (pp. 275-281).
