I discovered some amazing EdTech recently: the game Prodigy. It’s brilliant. Kids play it, and it’s an utterly uninspired example of modern gamification with a big dose of paid (by parents, of course) DLC. The selling point is that it’s (a) free for schools and (b) mixed in with the gamification is a little bit of measurement that is supposedly aligned to common core standards. The game does not even pretend to teach the material it measures.
And now we’ve gone past the usual endpoint where the metric becomes the goal. It seems that the ability to waste everyone’s time measuring the metrics has become the new goal.