Teacher turns class into a video game — and now every student is passing

It’s tough being a teacher. Kids have so many distractions in their lives, and it’s getting harder to engage tech-savvy students with more traditional subjects.

Elizabeth Box was struggling with engagement in her seventh-grade civics class in Okeechobee, Florida — the third-poorest Florida county, with a quarter of the population living below the poverty line. “I just started noticing a steady decline in kids’ engagement,” Box told me in a recent call. “They didn’t care. They were failing and they didn’t care. You called their parents and they wouldn’t care. I knew i had to do something; everything that I was doing wasn’t working.”