Tag: math

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 - 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

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

Week 7 Discussion

In Using Games to Break the Symbol Barrier, Keith Devlin provides Wuzzit as an example of an educational math game that uses a game’s visual affordances to convey math concepts without abstract math symbols in the way. I found Devlin’s concept of the “symbol barrier” to be accurate and compelling, and perhaps a leading cause for… Read more Week 7 Discussion

Week 7 response

This week’s readings emphasized the important difference between thoughtful, well-designed learning games and ineffective games. I figured that Zhang was talking about Coolmath before she even named it because of that site’s reputation for shallow math games. I hope that Zhang’s study is not understood to mean that math games are ineffective. Berkowitz et al… Read more Week 7 response

Week 7: Math

The Zhang article made me wonder how students’ interactions with online math games have changed in the age of YouTube. From Ashley’s talk last week, we learned that kids are no longer using Google to search for content. In the article, from November 2012-October 2013, 6% of traffic to coolmath-games came from social media sites including… Read more Week 7: Math

Tech Review and Redesign

The PBS Peg + Cat Big Gig app, based on the PBS Kids Series by the same name, aims to help kids between the ages of three and six practice counting and math through song. In this reflection, I analyze the positive contributions of the parasocial relationship afforded through the app on a child’s learning… Read more Tech Review and Redesign