Blog Post #6 - Week 11

Hey everyone! Thank you so much for following along with my math blog all these weeks! It has been a blast sharing my thoughts about math and what I have learned in my math course with all of you! This blog has allowed me to reflect deeply on teaching math and increase my understanding and confidence in my abilities as a teacher candidate. Unfortunately, this is my final blog post, so I hope you enjoy it and thanks for coming along for the ride with me!

This week in-class we shared math games that we had been playing and analyzing in smaller groups by presenting the ones we liked the best to our entire class. I really liked this activity because math can be a subject that is difficult to make relatable or engaging to students if you are always teaching it to them with a pen and paper. By implementing technology and math video games, you can not only show them how math can be engaging and fun, but you are also showing them how math can be fun and practical in their everyday life. I would like to now share some of my thoughts on some of the video games we shared as a class and share my thoughts on how I could incorporate them into classrooms.

Arcademics. Screenshot from Canoe Penguins. arcademics.com. Accessed November 19, 2019. https://www.arcademics.com/games/canoe-penguins

Quite a few of the games shared were from websites like Arcademics or mathplayground. While these games are fun and engaging for a short while, I feel like they lose their lustre quickly and they are not very strong at motivating students to continue playing and completing math work. The main reason I think this is because they are mostly very simple games mechanics-wise they all follow the same pattern of answer a math question and then your character moves forward a little bit in some form of race. While these simple games might work well at motivating younger students in the primary grades, I believe they fall short of being truly effective with junior and intermediate students. In today’s world where the games students play at home for fun have expansive worlds, multiple characters, problems to solve, and agency for the player; these simple design math games are not engaging enough. That is why I believe that games like mPower, Dreambox and Prodigy are the ones that I would try and implement with students.

TVO. mPower. orion.on.ca. Retrieved November 19, 2019. https://www.orion.on.ca/news-events/blog/free-digital-tools-from-tvo-to-improve-learning-at-your-school/attachment/tvo-mpower-900px/

mPower, Dreambox and Prodigy are effective because they are engaging enough to rival the video games that children play at home. This is because they have large worlds with multiple minigames, and they include some form of player agency. On top of that, they each come with a teacher portal where you as the teacher can track student performance and even send students specific lessons that you want them to work on! I could see myself implementing any of these three games into my teaching practice as a way for students to review concepts taught in class and for a way for them to continue having fun while learning math!

Check out this video about Prodigy below! Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8&v=A0CtplncQnU&feature=emb_logo

Thank you so much for following me on this journey! I hope you enjoyed my blog posts and I wish the best in all of your endeavours! Goodbye!