Posts tagged games

The first three weeks of the graduate “Learning and Assessment in Secondary Math” were intense and exciting largely because of all the online opportunities for math. Technology wasn’t a focus of the course, but I invited students “to do what I do” online. Every assignment was real and live. For example, we made a Wikipedia article together – wth, Wikipedia, no article on Multiple Representations till we came along?

One of the tasks was to comment on Dan Meyer’s WCYDWT (here is the link to tomorrow’s Math 2.0 event) on any of the blogs writing about it. Here is one of the students, Al, expressing how real live tasks raise the assignment quality bar, and incidentally, requiring more time: “Personally, I think it does not make sense to add to a blog just for the sake of adding to a blog.  Dan seems pretty responsive as a moderator, and I feel a non-additive comment just makes more work for everyone.  Also, Dan’s blog is more than just a blog to me.  It’s more like an educational site where I need to take some time to parse and understand what he has posted.
Although I like this task, I would probably need to devote at least another hour to digest the posts and make a comment that wasn’t silly.”

You said it!

The picture starting the screencast today is me climbing the Raleigh concert hall with our wonderful parkour group. I finally found what I need to move around: some reasonable prompts for roleplay. Every time I do parkour, some fantasies of chases, usually extremely silly, invariably come to mind. It helps that the parkour community makes little videos about zombie chases, or references that awesome “Men in Black” scene.

This is exactly the phenomenon happening in many Math Clubs: a little roleplay prompt goes a very long way for engagement. For example, just mention the Spiderman before doing line art or coordinate plane work. The flow of the roleplay has to match the flow of the math activity, though! I could not roleplay chases on an exercise bike. Most textbook cookie cutter attempts to attach pop culture to math are so far from intrinsic. And some purists argue against roleplay around math because math is its own context that is fun by itself. For about 5% of the population, I may add – just like exercise is not meaningful for me by itself, but it is in the context of chase roleplay parkour provides.

I need to wikify the work on books, meanwhile, here is my rendition of the cover elements; it will NOT look like this – I am not a designer, etc. It’s a sketch.