week 7 – EDUC 342: Child Development & New Technologies https://ed342.gse.stanford.edu Fri, 19 Feb 2016 07:35:52 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.6.1 Week 7 https://ed342.gse.stanford.edu/week-7-2/ https://ed342.gse.stanford.edu/week-7-2/#respond Fri, 19 Feb 2016 07:32:10 +0000 http://ed342.gse.stanford.edu/?p=1521 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 childhood was full of math games. I still remember looking at the Pythagorean Triangle drawn on my garage wall as a child wondering what it meant. My sister was a math major and I highly considered being one before settling on Symbolic Systems. It is clear to me that the engagement I had with my mom around math at home was a very significant component in my math achievement. I suppose I wonder how can we expand apps like this so that young children who do not have parents who are comfortable with math can gain the necessary engagement to improve their math skills. Particularly I wonder how do we change the mindset around math in the home to be more like that of stories in the home- a necessary part of a child’s home experience. And how can we support parents so that they may better engage with their children in the home? Is their a way to provide a math app that has a component solely for parents to become more comfortable with the math, in addition to a component that allows them to engage in the material with their children?

]]> https://ed342.gse.stanford.edu/week-7-2/feed/ 0 Week 7 https://ed342.gse.stanford.edu/week-7/ https://ed342.gse.stanford.edu/week-7/#respond Thu, 18 Feb 2016 08:51:33 +0000 http://ed342.gse.stanford.edu/?p=1459 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 is that this is directed towards children who can be more vulnerable.

The paper mentioned that using cool-math games may actually increase the achievement gap. This seems like a dire negative effect of a seemingly helpful at best and innocuous at worst website. However, children may go on this website, play games and mentally attribute the time they spend on it as time spent doing math. However, if/when they see no improvement in there math, they may feel that they are naturally uninclined towards math and the fact that there are no results for all there work may be demotivating.

I played a few games on cool-math games after reading the paper and if they do improve math skills they do it in a HIGHLY indirect way. One game that I played involved making a character move through an easily navigable maze and collect stars. Absolutely no math skills and even problem solving skills. The idea of a child spending hours on something like this under the illusion that he/she is developing math skills makes me sad.

Such websites mislead people and take advantage of their vulnerability and really should be held accountable for the false claims they make.

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