Does your child find colorful online math problems much harder than the same math problems on paper?

[Anonymous]

My child's math teacher uses cutesy fonts and about 5 different colors for per-algebra math problems. My daughter is a good math student so I wondered why she struggled when I could literally give her the same math problems in writing and she'd do fine. She does great on ecarts too which are not colorful. Low and behold when i took a look I found the colorful math problems on colorful slides set off my own ADD and stress. She didn't color code to make the math problems easier, it's just lots of random colors and cutesy fonts and I actually got a headache going through the group of slides my daughter had trouble with. Is this a thing? Do other kids find it really distracting visually? I always thought bright colors are supposed to help kids maintain attention, but this was almost like listening to clashing music. I did politely let the teacher know so she gets regular black and white problems to print out sometimes for homework. Just wondering how common this is.

[Anonymous]

My kids' teacher doesn't use colorful fonts or anything, but online in general is harder for her than on paper. She goes much faster and gets more wrong. If I print things out and she reads the directions on paper and does the problem on paper, it goes much better.

Print in grayscale, maybe?

[Anonymous]

Wow, from your description I am imagining a full-on visual assault, bad scrapbooking edition. Please let the teacher know that it is detrimental to the learning environment, she was probably going for cute and attention getting, but missed the mark. I'm sure that if you phrase it kindly, the feedback will.be helpful to her.

[Anonymous]

I have a very bright colleague who gets very distracted with highlighting etc. She cannot see the details that are not highlighted when this happens. And she was smart enough to pass this along to me. Let the teacher knows it is distracting and would she provide the document without the fonts and color revisions instead.

[Anonymous]

Why doesn't she just rewrite the problem in a notebook or piece of paper?

[Anonymous]

Our child’s teacher in fcps only uses the horrible slides from
gatehouse for math. They are incredibly difficult to use, the directions are often unclear, and my dc spends much more
time trying to type or dragging things around the slide then thinking about math. I would so much prefer just an old fashioned worksheet with problems on it.

[Anonymous]

Does she buy the work off TPT? For some reason a lot of the crap on there is overly busy with weird sorority girl fonts.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Our child’s teacher in fcps only uses the horrible slides from
gatehouse for math. They are incredibly difficult to use, the directions are often unclear, and my dc spends much more
time trying to type or dragging things around the slide then thinking about math. I would so much prefer just an old fashioned worksheet with problems on it.

Doing math on Google Slides is horrible - dragging text boxes is one of the least friendly user interfaces I can possibly imagine.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Does she buy the work off TPT? For some reason a lot of the crap on there is overly busy with weird sorority girl fonts.

The makers of those fonts, and also the cutesy, kind of cartoon-y historical figures, must have made millions. Hats off to them for finding a way to market their skills.

But I hate it so much.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Our child’s teacher in fcps only uses the horrible slides from
gatehouse for math. They are incredibly difficult to use, the directions are often unclear, and my dc spends much more
time trying to type or dragging things around the slide then thinking about math. I would so much prefer just an old fashioned worksheet with problems on it.

Doing math on Google Slides is horrible - dragging text boxes is one of the least friendly user interfaces I can possibly imagine.

My 2nd grader uses those slides. They're pretty easy to use. Occasionally DC will get frustrated but usually has no problem. The frustration is usually from rushing and then getting confused, not from the interface.

[Anonymous]

I think I would find colorful online math problems harder than standard math problems on paper... Readability is like computer usage 101 lol

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Our child’s teacher in fcps only uses the horrible slides from
gatehouse for math. They are incredibly difficult to use, the directions are often unclear, and my dc spends much more
time trying to type or dragging things around the slide then thinking about math. I would so much prefer just an old fashioned worksheet with problems on it.

Doing math on Google Slides is horrible - dragging text boxes is one of the least friendly user interfaces I can possibly imagine.

My 2nd grader uses those slides. They're pretty easy to use. Occasionally DC will get frustrated but usually has no problem. The frustration is usually from rushing and then getting confused, not from the interface.

Glad your second grader doesn't mind. My 3rd grader has a good handle on it also. It frustrated my first grader who is young for grade and has the fine motor control of a just-turned-six-year-old to no end. Also I'm a web developer, so usability is one of my things. There are a lot of other, better ways to accomplish the same task. For example: drag an image with the number on it instead of a text box - bigger drag target for little hands.

[Anonymous]

I had a hard time with "page splatter" in my college textbooks. Trying to deal with overly busy computer slides in elementary would have sent me over the edge. And is one of the reasons why we're stuck supplementing our kid in just about every subject via textbooks at home.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Does she buy the work off TPT? For some reason a lot of the crap on there is overly busy with weird sorority girl fonts.

OP here.It is definitely cutesy sorority girl type font with lots of pretty colors, so perhaps.