Week 8 response - "a reason to reason"

The Steinkuehler and Duncan reading touches on something important that I think has less to do with science education than with the motivation and purpose behind reasoning and learning. Their argument is that games, and particularly MMORPGs like World of Warcraft,  might be excellent settings to foster scientific thinking. They note that in the WoW online forums,… Read more Week 8 response - "a reason to reason"

Week 7

I would first like to note that I found the Berkowitz reading to be fascinating. Particularly due to the success of this app and the clear demonstration that interaction with parents around math leads to math achievement. I suppose this is interesting to me because I am the daughter of a math teacher. Thus, my… Read more Week 7

Week 7 Discussion

“While MOOCs, high-quality educational materials developed by elite universities, are used to reinforce the advantage of privileged adults, the opposite appeared to be true for socio-economically disadvantaged youth, who might be spending significant amounts of time on leisure- oriented websites like coolmath-games that have little evidence for the potential in advancing their social and human… Read more Week 7 Discussion

Week 7 - Thu Ngo

The Keith Devlin video gave me a totally new perspective on math and symbols. The first is that I’ve always seen math as what Devlin describes as “the representation of math”. The second is that the symbols that we use to use represent math is artificial. This second realization was huge for me. Mathematical symbols… Read more Week 7 - Thu Ngo

Week 7

I found the article on the cool-math games website extremely fascinating. It reminded me of Luminosity which was recently sued for millions of dollars for claiming to make games that improve your ‘brainpower’ when in actuality they did nothing. Cool-math games also seems to have an empty claim like this and what is even worse… Read more Week 7

Bedtime Books and coolmath

I found the Berkowitz study to be interesting mainly because I find it hard that they were able to find “math” books that did not also have an effect on children’s literacy. Separating the two seems impossible to me. To Berkowitz’s point though that mathematical skills lag behind literacy due to lack of parent interaction… Read more Bedtime Books and coolmath

Week 7 Reading

As a student who loved math growing up, but gradually lost interest over time, I often wonder what changed. I found Keith Devlin’s talk on “Using Video Games to Break the Symbol Barrier” very interesting.  Devlin argues that one explanation might be found in the way math is represented, particularly in its symbolic form. He proposes… Read more Week 7 Reading

Week 7: Role of technology in simple interventions

What I got out of the readings is that interventions can be really simple and don’t have to involve high technology. Interventions like talking kids through math problems and solutions, and supervising on which websites to go to, can make a huge difference. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a professor, who… Read more Week 7: Role of technology in simple interventions

Week 7 Discussion - Juan G

I was surprised when I read that educational research had not taken advantage of the popularity of coolmath-games. By collaborating with a popular site such as coolmath, we can gather data that could help designers use this information to work on creating games that are not just popular, but also effective in improving student performance. I… Read more Week 7 Discussion - Juan G

Are we designing for the wrong learning goal?

I was interested in the results of the Berkowitz article, which found that children from families with math anxiety improved their understanding of math after playing with a math app at least once a week. However, playing with the app more than once a week did not further improve their math scores. This result made… Read more Are we designing for the wrong learning goal?