‘You do the math’: Mathletics and the play of online learning

Mathletics: Functionality and aesthetics

Mathletics is a subscription-driven educational web application owned and operated by 3P Learning. ¹ Launched in 2005, it supports online mathematics learning and competitive math playing for school-aged children (see Figure 1). ² Originally developed in Australia, Mathletics is widely popular, with claims it is ‘Australia’s most used educational website’ (3P Learning, 2010a), and used by anywhere up to 4000 schools and 800,000 students nationwide. ³ It is now available in Europe, the USA, and Asia, and though difficult to confirm, 3P Learning report it is used by more than 3.5 million students and 10,000 schools worldwide (3P Learning, 2010a). A subscription is required to gain access to and play on the Mathletics site; this can be purchased by individuals, families or schools.

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Figure 1.

Mathletics homepage screenshot

A Mathletics subscription allows children to access and personalize an online account. Online users – known as ‘Mathletes’ – can either do maths-related activities and courses or play Live Mathletics. The courses are designed to be worked through individually or as a class, at school or at home, and progress through the local school maths curriculum, whilst Live Mathletics is a real-time networked game of competition maths. Games of Live Mathletics last for 60 seconds, and involve children racing to answer as many quick-fire maths questions correctly as they can against other Mathletes online (see Figure 2), with the program searching for opponents based on players with a similar ranking.

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Figure 2.

Mathletics website screen shots of Live Mathletics: (a) finding playing partners from around the world; (b) competition between four players showing progress (as coloured columns), errors (as cross marks) and time remaining (as digital clock).

Mathletes get ranked, receive certificates and earn credits for getting answers correct, completing courses and achieving high scores in Live Mathletics. ⁴ The credits earned are used as virtual currency within the site to purchase virtual goods in order to customize an online profile on the Face Maker page (see Figure 3). To do so the credits are spent in the Mathletics shop, where players can buy a range of accessories such as wallpaper, hair styles, facial features and clothing (glasses, hats etc), to ‘create your own individual look’; ‘Here you can “spend” your credits. You can choose from “groovy” accessories, crazy hair colours and futuristic backgrounds’ (3P Learning, 2010b: 2). The shop is regularly updated with new products, and these range in price.

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Figure 3.

Mathletics Facemaker page and shop screenshots

Mathletics: Web 2.0 application

The operators 3P Learning describe Mathletics as ‘the next generation in learning’, and an ‘interactive e-learning resource, for schools, parents and students’ (3P Learning, 2010a), which integrates the web-based application with traditional school-based curriculum to make it ‘like having a maths tutor 24 hours a day!’ The emphasis of Mathletics is, then, on a particular model of technologically enabled and online-assisted learning, which appropriates many of the functions and aesthetics credited to Web 2.0 technologies. Web 2.0, though lacking a universally accepted definition, is commonly seen to be a more accessible, interactive, dynamic and flexible web than the ‘Web 1.0’ which preceded it (Anderson, 2007; O’Reilly, 2005). Typically viewed as an enhanced or richer user experience, Web 2.0 applications are characterized by lower barriers to online content creation and editing by not requiring users to be familiar or proficient with programming language, such as HTML. This more ‘social software’ provides user-friendly tools or interfaces that allow people to more easily create content and thereby become increasingly active and inter-active participants and contributors online, rather than simply browsers or readers.

A read/write web, where anyone could view and edit pages of marked-up information (HTML) was part of Tim Berners-Lee’s original intention (Laningham, 2006), meaning Web 2.0 is not so much a radical departure as a more fully implemented and inclusive version of the original web vision. Thus, rather than being seen in opposition, this ordering is better viewed along a spectrum of functionality in which applications have characteristics that are more or less participatory. Mathletics operates as a web-based platform and parts of its architecture are participatory, and thus in some ways it embodies Web 2.0 ideas and functions. It has dynamic and regularly updated, rather than static, content; it is customizable, with users able to edit their profiles without programming skills; the environment and identities of users are persistent and personalized; and the Live Mathletics facilitates a degree of interaction with other students online.

Nevertheless, much of the application’s architecture remains locked rather than participatory, and the opportunities for users to create or modify content are delimited to a few relatively meagre consumer options, such as selecting from the range of virtual goods provided. The software is not open to modifications or additions of code and content and is not, therefore, the model Web 2.0 co-creation and innovation between users and developers envisaged by Herz (2002) for example. Similarly, direct communication with other players within the application is not possible, so interaction is limited to more indirect forms of displaying and viewing profiles or competing against other Mathletes in games of Live Mathletics.

Despite these limitations, the available Web 2.0 functions and aesthetics of Mathletics variously appeal to students, teachers and parents. They appeal to children by enabling possibilities for having fun within an educational context. The application is designed to teach maths and to allow children to learn at their individual pace and level of knowledge. Yet, by appropriating the rhetoric, appearance and functionality of Web 2.0 platforms, Mathletics also affords opportunities to play and have fun whilst learning.

The customizable functionality of Mathletics appeals to educators by providing a resource to assist with teaching the maths curriculum, which is managed through the Teacher Centre, and allows teachers to individually customize coursework and generate reports for assessment. Described as a ‘constantly updated … online learning community’, in which ‘teachers … can be confident that they are using the most effective and relevant resource available’ (3P Learning, 2010a), the marketing and design of the site is presented as a technically sophisticated and educationally relevant tool to disburden teachers of administrative, teaching and assessment work. The success of this appeal is reflected in the purchase of the commercial Mathletics program by many schools, and its endorsement for use in the Australian mathematics curriculum by government education departments. ⁵

Mathletics functionality also has clear appeal for parents. It operates as an aid for independent mathematics learning, but also informs the broader ambitions and anxieties held by parents about digital education – access and literacy – and for their children’s use of the internet as an educational tool rather than simply a technology for play or entertainment (Livingstone, 2009; Seiter, 2005). Parents are able to access a Parent Centre on the site where they can view reports on their children’s progress, as well as edit their child’s grade level or assign tasks. This possibility for monitoring helps to underpin trust in the site, which is further bolstered by our finding that the site was endorsed and provided to our participant families by local schools.

Mathletics materiality: Affordances and technicity

In appealing to children’s motivations for play, to teachers’ needs for classroom resources, and to parental ambitions for their child’s internet education, the multiple users of Mathletics are accommodated by the application affording multiple uses. The term affordance was originally coined by psychologist James Gibson (1977, 1979) to refer to properties embedded within an object or technology, innate qualities possessed by an object, which enabled an individual to physically act or proceed in some way. These affordances can be seen in the design features and functionality of the Mathletics application that direct or enable usage in certain ways, especially the more guided and intended uses by teachers and parents.

The term affordance has since been modified within the fields of human–computer interaction and technology studies, however, to include properties that users themselves identify, perceive or appropriate (e.g., Costall, 1995; Norman, 1988), and includes both physical properties and symbolic meanings. These can be seen in the views and values attached to the application by parents, which exceed the specific educational goals of maths built into the design to include other modes and forms of learning we detail below. Importantly, then, affordances are not predetermined or independent, they do not simply exist within the technological artefact itself (objective) nor the person alone (subjective), but instead emerge through design, context and use, as an outcome of their interaction or relationship. This relational and inter-dependent understanding of affordance is made clearer in the ways we found children themselves using and appropriating the application, which we report in the findings.

The dynamics of Mathletics play is a shared or collaborative process that does not only include people – students, parents and teachers – but also the material possibilities and limits of the software. This socio-technical understanding suggests the affordances of Mathletics are relational formations distributed through networked contexts of digital media. That is, affordances are part of a broader process of technicity. Technicity is a concept developed by the technical philosophy of Gilbert Simondon in the 1950s and 60s, and while pre-dating the internet has particular resonance for online applications, contexts and practices (Simondon, 1958, 1989). For Simondon, technicity understands technical objects as neither discrete nor stable things, but as subject to ongoing mutability depending on their development and use. The ‘mode of existence of technical objects’ is, thus, one in which objects exist as spatial networks comprised of technical elements, individual objects and ensembles of technology systems, whilst their temporal existence is defined by processes and relations of genesis, evolution and coherence. The concept of technicity is particularly relevant for our comprehension of digital objects, understood as things produced through and existing in distributed, mutable and ongoing arrangements of design, operation and use.

This theoretical perspective has traction for digital culture, and in particular for online games and play – including educational games - with game scholars Patrick Crogan and Helen Kennedy recently calling for a technicity of game studies (2009). A technicity of gaming – the ways in which game play is assembled through a number of interconnected components – offers a critical lens in which, they argue, we can critically examine human–technology interactions in games in order to question tired binaries and naïve assumptions of technological instrumentality – technologies as mere utensils or conduits to play, rather than active mediating agents – or notions of the player as a coherent or discrete entity. Thus, technicity emphasizes the dynamic arrangements and interactions of people and technologies, and, importantly, lends a sophisticated approach to the techno-cultural contexts of games, play and educational software.

Moreover, this approach dispels any straightforward or easy assumptions of Web 2.0 as a solely user-centred web by highlighting that architectures of participation in applications like Mathletics are not solely for the benefit of participants; rather the inter-relations shaped around and through the software are just as much for the benefit of the digital object itself or for its value to owners. Web 2.0 is not just a user or social model, but also a technical and business model (Herz, 2002; O’Reilly, 2005). As we have seen the Web 2.0 functionality and aesthetics of Mathletics manages to mediate between and variously appeal to teachers, parents and students by affording multiple uses and benefits. Yet, as we detail further in the discussion, the materiality of the software in turn leverages user-contributions to collaboratively develop the content, look and commercial value of the application.

Aims

The case study is drawn from findings of an ethnographic study of children’s technology use, experience and regulation in Melbourne, Australia. The Screen Stories research project, described below, looked at the role of technology for supporting children’s social inclusion. During this research, whilst observing and discussing children’s internet use, Mathletics emerged as a popular and significant application for both parent and child participants. We decided to explore the application further, investigating home contexts of Mathletics use and parental regulation of Mathletics, as well as children’s uses and perceptions of Mathletics.

In exploring the domestic context of use and governance of technologies, it became clear that Mathletics resonated with and mediated multiple sites (home, school, mobile) and actors (teachers, parents, students). This was achieved by affording differing uses and benefits relevant to the motivations of each demographic. Rather than a discrete artefact or solo activity, the application was clearly something that emerged as and existed in more collaborative and distributed arrangements. This existence of technicity was consequently used to inform our theorization of the ethnographic data of student–software interaction in terms of a relational understanding or meaning of play – that is, the playability or scope for operation of a material or technology, as in the give or play in a length of rope. ⁶ The purpose of combining this theoretical approach with the empirical research was to explore how Mathletics impacts upon children’s modes, contexts and relations of learning, and further to assess what implications Web 2.0 more generally may have for children’s digital learning, play and culture.

Methods

The Screen Stories project aimed to develop an in-depth and contextual understanding of participant children and their families’ uses and experiences of digital technologies; it explored everyday relationships with technology, and how social inclusion is, and is not, facilitated through technology. We worked with five families with children aged 6–10 (10 parents; 9 children) over a period of three months and over multiple visits per household. The research predominantly took place in an outer-urban growth area of Melbourne, Australia, with the exception of one inner city family for comparative purposes.

We used multiple participatory methods to explore local and typically ordinary uses of media and communications technologies. In a home hardware tour families guided us through the geographies of devices in the home. An online tour enabled participants to provide an inventory of applications and sites regularly visited, as well as their expectations and experiences of these sites. Participants also drew flow diagrams to visually represent the relationship between social interactions and the use of technologies. We conducted semi-structured interviews alongside and following these methods using prompts and questions informed by the results.

Our ethnographic methods accommodated important methodological and ethical concerns that arise with child-focused research (Livingstone, 2009). In particular, the methods catered for a repertoire of communication modes – verbal, written, demonstration – to enable children to choose from multiple ways to participate and share with us their experiences of communications technologies. These methods of data-gathering necessarily entail a large commitment of time and energy, and therefore limit the range of perspectives that can be sampled. Nevertheless, this kind of qualitative research affords access to more detailed information, experiences and opinions in the context of people’s daily lives and so operates to complement the kinds of data collected in quantitative studies. The activities we encountered were often embedded in the contexts of technology use, and may not have been accounted for by less interactive methods. In particular, it was by sitting with children in front of a connected computer screen in their homes and having them show us their online activities – what sites they visited and what they liked to do – while also telling use what they thought and felt about these sites – their screen stories – that the importance of Mathletics for children’s digital learning, play and inclusion emerged.

Online learning contexts and parental mediation

Whilst the classroom contexts of Mathletics use demand further research, the present study was situated within home contexts and this article analyses the uses and values particular to this location. Mathletics emerged as a significant site for our participant families in terms of children’s use of the internet and in terms of parents’ perceptions and supervision of their children’s internet use. All of the children in our study had used the application, and most continued to use it regularly for homework activities, but also as we detail later, for fun. Its endorsement by teachers and schools was evident in their provision of a subscription and the setting of homework tasks, and its use was encouraged by parents who supported their children using the site at home.

Our findings accord with much previous youth internet literature, showing that the online activities of primary-school aged children centre on homework or playing games (e.g., ACMA, 2007; Fox and Jones, 2009; Livingstone, 2009); and that these early and limited uses mean children’s digital inclusion is about the provision of access and resources to support possibilities for learning, play, and social development (e.g., Seiter, 2005; Valentine et al., 2002). Further, our findings conform to previous research on parental mediation of the internet, in which a range of strategies are implemented to manage or regulate children’s use of and safety on the internet (e.g., ACMA, 2007; Livingstone and Helsper, 2008; Nikken and Jansz, 2006). In this instance, based on its educational value and provision by schools, Mathletics was universally approved and permitted for use by parents in our study as an acceptable online activity.

Parental support for the application coalesced around the theme of digital inclusion, with parents’ sentiments about the benefits of Mathletics – the perceived affordances – of the application relating to issues of digital access, education and literacy:

As these quotes show, the kinds of skills that parents perceived their children acquiring or that they valued in the game vary. Of course there is the maths being learned through doing exercises, but there is also a sense that the site enables children to develop a range of additional skills. These include functional kinds of computer skills, such as typing, using software applications and learning familiarity and proficiency with computers (Hobbs, 2008; Tyner, 1998), but also more digital culture skills, or what are referred to as ‘soft skills’ (Jenkins, 2009; Livingstone, 2009). These describe the skills to navigate, participate or contribute to online content and life using Web 2.0 technologies, and include improvisation, multitasking, and knowledge sharing (Jenkins, 2009: 56). In this instance, a particular soft skill that parents perceived and celebrated is the ability to process information ‘fast’. This skill is situated within the temporal logics of new media, where an accelerated pace of information flows that Hassan refers to as network time (2007) implies new experiences and expectations for time management. Parents acknowledge – implicitly and explicitly – that such skills are afforded by the site and will be necessary for future employment in an information economy.

Alongside the perceived benefits of Mathletics for children’s digital learning and literacy, and the support given in its use, parents were also aware of children’s more playful appropriations of the application. The theme of play was acknowledged by parents in terms of children’s limited or selective uses, particularly in playing easy games of Live Mathletics to win points and purchase virtual goods. In the contexts of digital learning, these agendas of play were sometimes seen as complementary and sometimes contradictory, and thus either encouraged or challenged:

Children’s use, play and collaboration

These themes of learning and play also emerged in children’s discussions and demonstrations of Mathletics use. And, like their parents, children also expressed uncertainty about the relationship between learning and playing within the application. When asked whether Mathletics is more like a game or learning, children were equivocal:

Cindy (female, age 6): ⁷ More like learning. It’s like a game and learning.

Lee (male, age 9): Kinda education, or both.

Children’s equivocation is explained, in part, by the fact that play is clearly afforded within the design of the Mathletics education software. By appropriating the rhetoric, appearance and functionality of Web 2.0 platforms – participatory and interactive forms of content production and consumption – the design of Mathletics attempts to make learning fun by providing opportunities to play. The appeal of playful uses was evident when we asked children what they liked about Mathletics, with their responses emphasizing playing Live Mathletics, accumulating credits, consuming virtual goods in the shop and profile editing:

Whilst play was prominent in children’s reasons for using the application, one child explained that their preference for Live Mathletics was not to accumulate points to buy accessories for their profile, but to learn:

Perhaps, however, this comment was sensitive to the research audience and an attempt to provide the ‘right’ answer for adults, as this logic was contradicted by game actions. When children, including Lee, were asked to demonstrate how they used the site, they invariably played a round of Live Mathletics, demonstrated how they bought virtual goods through the Mathletics shop, or edited their Mathlete profile on the Facemaker page, which was then displayed as a matter of identity and distinction. When playing Live Mathletics, children universally played the easiest level. ⁸ Specifically they all chose the ‘easy’ addition game – adding two numbers between 1 and 9 together – in order to accumulate credits to purchase virtual goods. Further discussions during sessions of Live Mathletics play revealed that children chose to play the easiest level as this was perceived to be the quickest way to accumulate points: ⁹

The game, then, affords a number of ways for children to play Mathletics in excess of simply learning maths, yet at the same time this occurred in parallel to alternative parental or educational values afforded by the site. Moreover, to pursue these modes of play children sometimes employed tactics such as getting someone better at live maths to play on their behalf:

Or, as we found online after one participant mentioned he had heard about Mathletics hacks, there are a number of efforts made to collaborate with other children online through forums, Youtube clips, and wiki and Yahoo answer pages in an attempt to cheat or get free credits and circumvent orthodox uses of the program. Such cheats represent ways children attempt to avoid doing actual maths work, while pretending to have done it in order to fool their parents and teachers, or to find ways to gain credits to spend in the shops. Similar kinds of evasive or tactical moves are observed in youth media literature, with children doing things like multitasking and minimizing windows when parents look on (Shepherd et al., 2006), or claiming an educational value for a game (Livingstone, 2009: 44). These internet uses are often about negotiating domestic, parental or educational restrictions in order to satisfy or achieve personal goals of use – largely for leisure, play or entertainment (Buckingham, 2003).

With Mathletics, these playful tactics involved subverting the program conventions or expectations of progressing through the maths curriculum, and included things like the repetitive playing of easy games, of getting others to play on your behalf, or of collaborating online with peers to pursue cheats. These appropriations, limited uses, and ‘mis-uses’ of the program show that the Web 2.0 environment of such educational software affords forms of online knowledge sharing or ‘distributed collaboration’ (Shirky, 2008). This is acknowledged as a significant soft digital culture skill, but in the case of Mathletics, the collaborative forms of interaction were not just for the purpose of learning maths, but also pursued to cheat the game, to extract enjoyment, or to make the activity social. Such distributed and collective forms of use may, therefore, be read as unapproved or illegitimate in contravening expectations of either singular or authorized use.

Moreover such distributions were not just social, but also socio-technical interactions. This was evident when we observed the physical act of playing Live Mathletics, in which children shared a distinct embodied game interaction (Dourish, 2001; Nansen, 2009). This began by hovering still over the keyboard, fingers resting on the number pad, eyes staring at the screen waiting in anticipation for the game begin. When the game clock ticked over, they would bend into the computer and suddenly start bashing heavily at the keyboard, eyes darting between the screen and the buttons with a concentrated focus. This striking physical action challenges many dematerialized and disembodied ideas of software in game studies. Further this configuration collapses any easy distinctions between games that are embodied and those that are not. All computer games involve players – and bodies – doing something and not just seeing, reading or watching something. This extends from even the most basic button-controlled games through to the clearer examples of active or kinetic gaming. There is always an interface, always a material encounter between gamer and game and thus computer use and digital game play is always embodied in some way (Hayles, 1999; Munster, 2006). In this instance, the demands and reward of playing Live Mathletics materialized an intensity of keyboard bashing, and thus a particular configuration or technicity involving cognition (maths equations), corporeal action (finger tapping), technical objects (keyboard, monitor, maths software) and technical ensembles (the internet network and infrastructure).

Mathletics counter-play and affordances

The alternative and playful uses we witnessed can be located within a growing research interest in counter-play. Counter-play, and cheating, has a long history in digital gaming (Consalvo, 2007; Dieter and Apperley, 2010; Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, 2009); it is conventionally seen as a problem, and oppositional to the game design or rules, yet a more critical approach understands counter-play as entwined with, part of and even constitutive of play and the digital games industry. Mia Consalvo (2007), for example, examines histories of digital cheating in relation to social formations and technical modifications of play to show that in digital culture cheating is not simply oppositional or illegitimate but in fact ordinary, generative and often supported by and reincorporated back into game designs or products. In gaming communities, cheats and counter-play are creative engagements with the game that challenge the imposed limits of the design, which enable new possibilities for action or earn players status within gaming communities.

Counter-play in Mathletics is undertaken to negotiate the parental and educational stakes in children’s digital culture. Children spend time playing easy games, or try to circumvent having to spend time playing, to accrue points to modify their Mathlete’s appearance and possessions, which serves to represent their status or capital within the Mathletics world. As Herz (2002: 18) notes, this accretion of value through points, or ‘leveling up’, is used to quantify shifts in understandings of leisure-time within digital economies from notions of idleness or waste to industriousness. Status is quantifiable in terms of scores or points, and these are evidence of acquired skill or knowledge. Yet as shown by Mathletics, this skill or knowledge is not always directly related to the prescribed activity within the game.

Instead, the web of social and technical relationships involving players in both competitive and cooperative interactions with each other and the software reveals that children’s forms and modes of learning are varied, often exceeding the direct task to include Web 2.0 skills such as shared and distributed forms of knowledge sharing. With Mathletics children are learning maths but also learning to participate in, and play with, social software and digital culture in both legitimate and illegitimate ways. Whilst this counterplay ostensibly appears as a challenge to the function of the site, it can also be seen to be accommodated within the commercial operation and logic of the site. The Mathletics application is able to accommodate varied modes of learning – individual and collective, authorized and unauthorized – without undermining or destabilizing the integrity of the application. Thus children’s Mathletics counter-play can be viewed as one of the application’s affordances, yet such affordances are not determined by the site or user alone, but instead are relationally organized, emerging over time through the combination of object design, context of use and collaborative forms of play.

Mathletics technicity and digital play

The affordances of Mathletics for teaching, learning, and playing, emerge through a product design that offers multiple modes of use and engagement, and thus appeals to different audiences and users. Yet these affordances operate within a wider field of technicity, in which the contexts of Web 2.0 applications enable children to collaborate in a number of ways to share knowledge and expand their opportunities for learning, cheating and playing. Within the contexts of education, this technicity informs debates about the possibilities and challenge of Web 2.0 to traditional ideas of knowledge production, dissemination and authentication, raising questions about privacy, plagiarism and the ownership of knowledge (e.g., Anderson, 2007). The concern of this article is not, however, limited to the impact of Web 2.0 applications for formal education, but also to what implications such technologies may have for children’s digital relations and digital culture. Mathletics use emerges through flexible affordances and a relational technicity that suggests this Web 2.0 application is not only played but in turn has a certain play. That is, the play of Mathletics can be understood in the sense of the give of the material or technology, its playability.

Play is a multivalent word, meaning amongst other things an act, action, conduct, or enterprise (nouns); or alternatively to produce, operate, perform, or exploit (verbs). In another sense it refers to the play or give of a material (e.g., rope). This meaning suggests a kind of material affordance – what a material enables – pointing to the interactive possibilities or uses of an artefact or environment. Children’s Mathletics play, from this perspective, emerges as a relational arrangement formed through the limitations and possibilities – the give – of the software or website (technology affordances), but also from finding cracks in the interstices of governance for children’s online spaces and times of use by parents and educators (social affordances). The give of Mathletics is, then, one in which children are able to appropriate the program in a number of ways. This conceptualization of play makes legible how the social and material affordances for play enable alternative or unauthorized performances and experiences to proceed alongside more accepted and legitimate use. This is a technicity of play in which the give allows for different forms of knowledge creation, sharing and application. The different forms of learning taking place, often simultaneously, include: learning maths, learning to be competitive, learning to use a computer or software, and learning to collaborate online and to circumvent programs as part of an enculturation to social media practices.

This concept and practice of digital play fits with a larger trajectory of game studies in which theories characterizing play as an occasion free of social conventions or constraints (Huizinga, 1955), are undergoing critique (e.g., Galloway, 2006; Juul, 2008; Malaby, 2007). Malaby, for example, stresses the importance of gaming context, challenging scholars to attend to the ways ‘they inhabit, reflect, and constitute the processes of everyday experience’ (2007: 102). Games and gaming situations are, then, in more recent games scholarship placed in a reciprocal relation with the everyday, the economic and the cultural. Here, play is situated in the socio-technical contexts of technology affordances and technicity, but also within the cultural-economy contexts of game play. For Mathletics, this context and relationality of play must, then, also account for the role of Web 2.0 in online business models and the corporate stakes in children’s educational software.

The give and the take

Mathletics is an example of the increasingly contested spaces of children’s digital culture: of online play shaped not only by educational concerns (e.g., Seiter, 2005), or parental anxieties (e.g., Livingstone, 2009), but also corporate interests (e.g., Chung and Grimes, 2005). Part of a broader commercialization of children’s online environments (Chung and Grimes, 2005; Grimes and Shade, 2005; Kline et al., 2003; Montgomery, 2007), Mathletics represents corporate investment in the digital spaces of children’s play and education by fostering and capturing parental anxieties and ambitions about the benefits of internet use for educational goals, and educational institutions’ concern for the pedagogical possibilities of the internet and the need for online resources. Computer access, use and literacy are seen as essential for educational advancement and future employment in a job market invariably connected to the global information economy, and this plays into a consumer model of education software.

Thus, at the same time as the give of the site, or perhaps more accurately, leveraging this give, is a certain commercial take. This take occurs literally through the requirement to subscribe to Mathletics, to pay for use – and thus differentiate access – but it also occurs through the commercial operation and logic of the application. While difficult to quantify, Mathletics operates like many other social networking and youth-oriented sites by gathering data for commercial use. Methods of data mining and collection generally work through participation in the site, requiring young users – and/or their parents – to first agree to commercial terms of service contracts that void them of many rights over their contributions or communications (Chung and Grimes, 2005; Grimes, 2008). Similarly with Mathletics, the terms of use contract authorizes 3P Learning to extract data from users of the site. ¹⁰ In addition to these commercial operations, Mathletics opportunities to play are, as with many other children’s sites, constructed around a logic and practice of exchange, accumulation and ownership (Seiter, 2005). We found this logic in the uses that children engaged with – accumulating credits, consuming virtual goods in the shop and profile editing.

Finally, as part of these commercial operations and logics, the contributions made by scores of users as part of a Web 2.0 architecture of participation inform a business model based on the relation of end-users to the software. This interaction provides a form of value through user- generated content, which is then reincorporated back into the existing product and leveraged to attract more subscribers and profitability. Consequently, just as the play of Mathletics suggests children are being enculturated into Web 2.0 practices such as collaborative learning, it also suggests they are being educated in the labour models and markets of digital capitalism. Business models of Web 2.0 content production appropriating similar forms of unpaid work have been discussed under the rubric of ‘free labour’ (Burston et al., 2010; Coté and Pybus, 2007; de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford, 2005; Terranova, 2004). The discussions of free labour within these conditions of digital capitalism have largely been built upon autonomist concepts of immaterial labour and the general intellect (e.g., Lazzarato, 1996), in order to problematize distinctions between adult spheres of economic and social life, yet this case study suggests it may also be time to further interrogate ‘free child labour’ online and the increasingly entangled relations between learning, playing and labouring in children’s digital culture.