But the game action is dropping blocks into a space to fill up lines. This is a game that seems like it has potential: given a number, factor that number into a rectangle (shout-out to Fawn Nguyen here in my talk), then drop the block you created by factoring to play Tetris.Īgain, the math action is factoring whole numbers and creating visual representations, which are good actions. A good math game should be easing you into the learning, not penalizing you when you are at your most vulnerable point, the beginning of your learning. The game gets worse, though, because AS the multiplying is preventing you from getting to the next iceberg, because maybe you are not good at it yet, you visibly see the other players pulling ahead, solidifying in your mind that you are bad at math, at exactly the point when you need the most support. The problem is that the math action is multiplying, which is not at all the same. Here you pick a penguin, color them, and then race other people online jumping from iceberg to iceberg. That skill is both the math action and the game action, so that alignment means that this game accomplishes its goal. Because of a time limit, you can’t calculate precisely where the platform needs to go, so you need to estimate. In this game, you help penguins cross a shark filled expanse by placing a platform for them to bounce over. The math here is preventing me from playing the game, not aiding me, which makes me resentful towards that math. If I’m a student playing this game, I want to play Pac-Man. If we apply the metric above and think about what is the math action and what is the game action? Here, the math actions are simplifying expressions and adding/subtracting, but the game actions are navigating the maze and avoiding ghosts. Example 1 – Math ManĪ Pac-Man game where you can only eat a certain ghost, depending on the solution to an equation. I hope to use what I learned in this process to have us make a new, better math game in the summer, during Twitter Math Camp. (I’m not saying review games and trivia games don’t have their place, but they can’t expand beyond their place.)īelow are the six examples I gave, with the breakdown of their game action and math action. It may seem like you could say “It’s just a game,” but students see it as a shallow way to spice something up that can’t stand on its own. This is the same essential argument as the one against psuedocontext. But if you pretend that they are the same, then you have problems. Maybe you want to play a trivia game, where the knowledge action is separate from the game action. If the math action required is separate from the game action performed, then it will seem forced and lead students to believe that math is useless. I sorta hit the same point over and over, using six different games as examples, but that’s because I truly believe it is the most important point in both designing math games as well as choosing which games to use in your classroom. I meant to write this follow-up post shortly after, but January was a hell of a month for me and it slipped to the wayside. Back in January I participated in a panel on Math Games over at the Global Math.
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