Why are students so engaged by their tablets, phones outside of class and so bored by them inside of class?

Dan Meyer taught high school math to students who didn't like math. He has advocated for better math instruction and is Chief Academic Officer at Desmos where he explores the future of math education. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University in Math Education and was named one of Tech & Learning's 30 Leaders of the Future. He lives in Mountain View, CA

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Thank you Dan Meyer for sharing this at #MAAthfest Chicago 
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https://whenmathhappens.com/3-act-math/

    Why are students so engaged by their tablets, phones, and laptops outside of class and so bored by them inside of class?
It’s the same device. But in one context, students are generally enthusiastic and focused. In the other, they’re often apathetic and distracted.
     We notice that, outside of class, students use their devices in ways that are social and creative. They create all kinds of media – text messages, videos, photos, etc. – and they share that media with their peers via social networks.
You might think that comparison is unfair – that school could never stack up next to Instagram or Snapchat – but before we write it off, let’s ask ourselves, “How social and creative is math edtech?” What do students create and whom do they share those creations with? In typical math edtech, students create number responses and multiple choice answers. And they typically share those creations with an algorithm, a few lines of code. In rarer cases, their teacher will see those creations, but more often the teacher will only see the grade the algorithm gave them.
For those reasons, we think that math edtech is generally anti-social and uncreative, which explains some of the apathy and distraction we see when students use technology inside of class. Rather than write off the comparison to Instagram and Snapchat as unreasonable, it has motivated us to ask two more questions:

1. How can we help students create mathematically in more diverse ways?

So we invite students to create parking lots, scale giants, mathematical arguments, tilings, sketches of relationships, laser configurations, drawings of polygons, tables, stacks of cards, Marbleslides, informal descriptions of mathematical abstractions, sequences of transformations, graphs of the world around them, and many more.
     How can we help teachers and students interact socially around those creations? So we collect all of those creations on a teacher dashboard and we give teachers a toolkit and strategies to help them create conversations around those creations. It’s easier to ask your students, “How are these two sketches the same? How are they different?” when both sketches are right in front of you and you’re able to pause your class to direct their focus to that conversation. Today, we’re releasing a new tool to help teachers develop social and creative math classrooms.
Challenge Creator
Previously in our activities, students would only complete challenges we created and answer questions we asked. With Challenge Creator, they create challenges for each other and ask each other questions. We tried this in one of our first activities, Waterline, where, first, we asked students to create a graph based on three vases we gave them and then we asked them to create a vase themselves. If they could successfully graph the vase, it went into a gallery where other students would try to graph it also. We began to see reports online of students’ impressive creativity and perseverance on that particular challenge. We started to suspect the following: that students care somewhat when they share their creations with an algorithm, and care somewhat more when they share their creations with their teacher. But they care enormously when they share their creations with each other!