Newly Enhanced Frax Offline Materials Engage Students and Assess for Understanding

Updated February 2024

The ExploreLearning team is pleased to announce that all Frax Sector 1 Captain’s Checkpoints (or “events”) are now updated! We’ve perked up the storylines, added whole-class rewards, and created a Checkpoint Manual for each Checkpoint to match Sector 2.

The Checkpoint Manual is your roadmap for the event. It walks you through the activity in detail and contains links to all the student-facing materials you will need. Links to each Checkpoint Manual are found in the  Frax Teacher Guide.

You will encounter a Captain’s Checkpoint in the Teacher Guide roughly every four to six Frax missions. Sector 1 of Frax contains 27 missions and six Captain’s Checkpoint events. Sector 2 contains 30 missions and five Captain’s Checkpoints. These events are designed to provide hands-on and in-class group activities for your students to support the content covered in the preceding missions.

We hope you enjoy these new additions to Frax!

ExploreLearning Frax is an interactive, online, game-based approach to teaching fractions. Frax uses the latest research and instructional methods to help students learn in the context of fun, space-themed missions. But did you know that Frax comes with a sizable (and recently expanded) collection of offline materials as well?

For teachers, the Teacher Guide is your hub of Frax-based information. You can lean on this guide for helpful notes and instructional tips to better link your classroom with what students are seeing in Frax. Students, meanwhile, can use Quick Checks and Captain's Checkpoints to bring a hands-on Frax experience into their classrooms.

It's recommended that students continue the journey with Frax by completing  Frax offline activities. Find out how to make the most of the Frax experience with these offline resources! 

The Teacher Guide

The Frax Teacher Guide is an essential tool for educators to support students as they engage in the Frax missions. It includes the instructional sequence for each sector, teacher notes, and more! 

Included in the Teacher Guide: 

• Mission objectives and activity descriptions
• Key language
• Mission debrief questions
• Captain’s Checkpoints
• Quick Checks

Captain’s Checkpoints

Students work individually to build an understanding of fractions in Frax missions, but there remains a need for them to transfer their thinking in a social, group environment. As students verbalize their reasoning during problem-solving, they can take their experiences from Frax missions and apply their understanding in new situations with Captain’s Checkpoints. Every four to six Frax missions, there is a link to the Captain’s Checkpoint along with a summary of the event and the learning objectives.

Below is an example of a Captain’s Checkpoint for Sector 2. In this event, students try to catch all the pesky bots, called NanoBots. They solve clues with their peers, using the skills they learned from the online Frax missions to confront new challenges in a group-based environment.

Quick Checks

Frax Quick Checks are an additional resource for teachers to use during Frax implementation. These brief questions can be used as formative assessments to check for understanding after each mission. Each Quick Check includes four questions that assess the skills and reasoning used in a particular Frax mission, with items mirroring the tasks students completed in the online games.

 How can I use them?

• Exit tickets
• Classwork grades
• Pre-assessment
• Task cards in math stations
• Prompts for math discussions

Not a current Frax user? Experience the online and offline fun in your classroom today!

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