Introduction
Hello and welcome to my mathematics blog site! My name is Corey Padgett and I am currently a teacher's candidate at Brock University, Ontario, Canada. The following blog posts will be used to track my progress as I develop the fundamental and pedagogical skills required to be an effective and valued teacher of mathematics. To achieve this latter goal my posts will discuss content covered during class, class assignments, and other relevant mathematical curiosities or interests that I have encountered throughout my time in this course. I hope you enjoy what it has to offer. Now let's buckle-up and get ready for the ride!
Week 1
Like most first days of school time was spent in class on administrative work. These tasks included expounding the class syllabus, student expectations, and required assignments. Doubtlessly, this latter work is necessary for organizing and clarifying class criteria, but, unfortunately, it does not provide interesting content for a blog post. Fortunately, however, our class was exposed to a math based game that I found to be quite stimulating. The game I am referring to is called "Game About Squares," I will now proceed to discuss its significance for teaching and learning mathematics.
Game About Squares can be categorized as what is often called "gamification." "Gamification" is loosely defined as an interactive method for learning a particular skill or content knowledge through means of typical gaming techniques. In other words, gamification attempts to increase student interest in learning by incorporating and combining the engaging aspects of game play with academic content. In my opinion, Game About Squares is an ideal example of gamification. While it is probably easiest to actually play the game to understand what it is, I will briefly try to explain the goals of Game About Squares here. Basically, the goal of the game is to get squares to cover circles of the same colour. This seems simple enough, however, as the game progresses multiple squares of various colours are introduced and the squares begin to move in multiple, often inconvenient, directions. These aspects create a challenging but fun and engaging game for students to interact with and, importantly, learn from.
Gamification is an important academic tool to use when developing lesson plans for student learning. Significantly, students become more engaged when learning is interactive, progressively challenging, and, perhaps most importantly, fun. If done properly, gamification has the qualities to achieve these latter goals effectively. While Game About Squares focuses primarily on learning and developing spatial reasoning skills, there are numerous math games available for almost any possible learning goal a teacher may require. Since in my experience gamification is an effective means for getting students interested and actively learning I believe it is a good way to introduce a unit, and should always be readily available for teachers of mathematics, especially when student interest seems to be waning. Therefore, in terms of engaging students and developing academic skill sets gamification is perhaps one of the most effective methods for achieving these latter ends.
No comments:
Post a Comment