Everyone goes on about “boys and their toys”, but according to research carried out by a revision app company, more girls than boys are using the app to help them revise.
The app is Gojimo. It provides educational content by working with various educational publishers. I haven’t tried the app myself, but I thought this set of statistics was interesting:
“30 per cent of all summer term revision activity was carried out over the four days in the middle of GCSE[1] exam week, between 1st and 4th June 2014: 79 per cent of this activity was carried out by girls.”
Gojimo was founded by someone called Guy Burgess, who was only 17 at the time. As he says, the statistics can be interpreted in several ways. Well, quite. Also, we don’t know how many students were in the sample size. Still, I quite like the idea that maybe Burgess is right when he infers from the data that:
“While boys are sticking to their traditional study guides, girls are exploring different revision options including mobile testing.”
I think more research needs to be carried out to see if this is actually true, or even possibly true. (It would be interesting, I think, to carry out your own survey amongst your classes: how do your students revise? If quite a number expect to revise on their phones or tablets, that is potentially very useful for you to know.) But whatever the “truth”, Gojimo looks interesting. At the moment it’s available only on IoS devices, but an Android version is due to be released in the first quarter of next year. Perhaps that will be in time for the Bett show, which takes place at the end of January.
[1] GCSE = General Certificate of Education, taken at 16 years old by many students in England.
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