Child protection nonprofit alleges 'manipulative' upselling with math game Prodigy

NBC NEWS:  “Schools are signing up for this and not understanding that the commercial pressure is going to happen when kids are at home,” said one expert.

The Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, a nonprofit advocacy group, on Friday accused a popular math game used in thousands of elementary schools of using “deceptive marketing and manipulative tactics” in a letter of complaint to the Federal Trade Commission.

Prodigy is a role-playing game aimed at first through eighth graders where players create customized wizard characters that enter “battles” to earn stars and prizes for solving curriculum-aligned math problems. The game has been downloaded more than 7.3 million times in North America since the start of 2019, according to the app researcher App Annie. Prodigy said that more than 90,000 schools globally — two thirds of them in the United States and the rest mostly in Canada, Australia and India — have used it to assign math homework...

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/child-protection-nonprofit-alleges-manipulative-upselling-math-game-prodigy-n1258294