Archive for the ‘Playing to Learn’ Category

Although I can’t see using Numenko for many college classes (except possibly for MathET), it would be a great game to help adult students practice their arithmetic skills in Developmental Math courses.  If you run a tutoring lab or a math help lab, I could see having a copy of Numenko handy.

Possibly Related Posts:

• History of Numeration Systems
• Collection of Math Games
• Signed Numbers: Colored Counters in a “Sea of Zeros”
• Math about the Electoral College
• Nature by Numbers

Here’s a game I created last week called “Antiderivative Block” to encourage students to (1) learn their derivative rules well (2) begin thinking about derivatives backwards, and (3) to learn to be careful not to mix up derivatives and antiderivatives.

Here’s the game board of a well-played game:

The rules are very simple (they are described on the game pdf), but the game play is complex enough that you really have to be on your toes to play.  Here are a couple of students demonstrating how to play:

I have to say that watching students play this game was the most fun I have ever had in a math class.  They quickly got very competitive and I heard several students in both classes say something like “I really need to learn these derivatives” – even when you think you have won the game, it can be lost by missing a negative on an answer.  Within 10-minutes, students from different pairs were challenging each other to matches (winners played winners).  Some won on mathematical skill alone (being better at the derivatives than their opponent), some won by playing the game well (and knowing their math).  Their attempts to psych each other out and cross-group banter had me laughing so hard in one class that I was crying.

Another interesting side effect of this game was that one of my ESL students suddenly got much better at correctly saying the math because his opponents wouldn’t let him claim spaces if he said “sine x squared” instead of “sine squared x” … I think his understanding of how to SAY the math had improved ten-fold by the end of the hour.

Don’t let the calculus nature of this game fool you.  You could build the exact same game for learning trig values of special angles, for learning to simplify exponential expressions, for exponential and log functions.  As a matter of fact, on the very same day I built this game, I instantly modified it for learning vocabulary in my MathET class (lucky for me, every student already had a set of small vocabulary cards that were the same size as the gameboard spaces).  Here they are playing Geometry Vocabulary Block:

We also had one group of three players (we used red chips for the third player) and everyone who tried the 3-player game said that the gameplay was very different than the 2-player game.  So a simple alteration to the game is just to change the number of players.  The students also suggested that they wanted more cards to move into the game board so that the problems were always fresh.

P.S. Sorry about the strange RSS problem this week. It was not intentional.  Just a misguided WordPress plugin that I tried.  Needless to say, it has been disabled.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Collection of Math Games
• Numenko: Math Game for Arithmetic
• Playing to Learn Math (the video)
• Shifting Assessment in a World with WolframAlpha
• Biography of Gamification Thought Leaders

This presentation is a philosophical argument for what is wrong with the way we teach math and why we need to bring the fun back to learning it.  It serves as an argument for any subject (although it is particularly targeted towards math).

Prezi presentation: Playing to Learn Math?

Video from MichMATYC keynote (45 min)

I haven’t had time to produce the picture-in-picture video, so if you want to watch the keynote, pull it up side-by-side with the Prezi and click through in the appropriate spots.

Possibly Related Posts:

• What does the classroom say?
• See you at AMATYC 2011
• What skills should we be teaching to future-proof an education?
• TEDxMuskegon: A Recipe for Free Range Learning
• Ignite on the Learn This Button

Last week, @enjoymentland posted a good list of thought leaders on the topic of gamification (but no links to any resources or explanation why these folks are on the list). I wanted to learn more about each person, so I’m adding biographical information and links to each name below.

Jane McGonigal, of TED Talk fame “Gaming can make a better world” and one of the founders of Gameful, a secret headquarters for “World-changing game designers” (read more about this at Kickstarter). Jane works at the Institute for the Future and is on twitter: @avantgame

Jesse Schell, from Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center, is also the author of The Art of Game Design, which examines psychological principles that make all kinds of games “good games.” Twitter: @jesseschell

B.J. Fogg teaches at Stanford and examines interesting methods and metrics for changing behavior (captology) and I so wish I had the time to take his Persuasive Online Video course. Twitter: @bjfogg

Dennis “Dens” Crowley is the co-founder of Foursquare and teaches (adjunct) at NYU. Twitter: @dens

Amy Jo Kim is a researcher on online communities and social architecture (and CEO of Shufflebrain). You can watch her Google Talk: Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Functional Software. Twitter: @amyjokim

Natron Baxter makes productivity games: ”Fun is not the enemy of work … or productivity” and was one of the developers who built Evoke. In particular, I love his tips for Knowledge Sharing (Zipline) and I suspect he’ll love the article that I’ve written about KM that publishes in December (if he asks nicely, I’ll let him read it now).  Twitter: @natronbaxter

Jen McCabe builds mobile health and Internet health games (see imoveyou). Twitter: @jensmccabe

Nicole Lazzaro is the President of XEODesign, Inc. She has a 2004 paper called Why we play games: Four keys to more emotion without stories (PDF).  The four “keys” are: 1. Hard fun, 2. Easy fun, 3. Altered States, and 4. The People Factor.  Twitter: @nicolelazzaro

Raph Koster is the author of my favorite book from the last year, A Theory of Fun for Game Design and a game designer in San Diego. Twitter: @raphkoster

Mark Pincus is the co-founder and CEO of Zynga (they built the games Mafia Wars and Farmville). Twitter: @markpinc (not active)

Gabe Zichermann of Gamification Co. is involved in organizing the Gamification Summit and is co-author of the book Game-based Marketing.  Twitter: @gzicherm

Eric Zimmerman is the co-author of Rules of Play, teaches courses on Game Design for various schools, is a member of Local Number 12, and writes the blog Being Playful.  I attended one of Eric’s social game design workshops at GLS2010 and it was great!  Twitter: @zimmermaneric (not active)

Keith Lee is the CEO and co-founder of Booyah (see MyTown). Twitter: @keithlee0 (not active)

Byron Reeves is a professor at Stanford, and the co-founder of Seriosity, Inc and has built a product called Attent (to gamify productivity).  You can see one of his talks, Work Sucks, Games are Great on TechAffair. Twitter: @Seriosity

Colleen Macklin (my addition to the list)  is a Professor at the Parsons New School for Design and the director of the PETLab.  I’ve seen Colleen speak twice and I think she’s doing some awesome work on influence games.  Twitter: @colleenmacklin

Who am I? Here’s my bio.  Maria Andersen is a learning futurist and math professor who has spent the last two years researching games, learning, and game design (why? she has her reasons).  She’s given numerous presentations in education about restructuring learning around the principles of game design and play (especially as it relates to math).  She’s created a collection of good games for higher education.  She is very interested in the gamification of learning, and soon enough (December), you’ll see one of the things she’s been working on.  Twitter: @busynessgirl

Possibly Related Posts:

• Numenko: Math Game for Arithmetic
• New Math Game: Antiderivative Block
• Playing to Learn Math (the video)
• Playing to Learn Math (new version)
• Random But Organized Thoughts (9-5-2010)

I am at the Kansas City Math Technology Expo this weekend doing two talks.

Today’s talk was Playing to Learn Math? I gave this at TexMATYC in the spring, but just updated it to add some non-digital types of play that you can use in the classroom.  There are five great math games mentioned in this presentation. Direct links to these games are below:

• NLVM Circle Puzzles (there are actually several Circle games on this page)
• Line Gem
• Factortris
• Flower Power (also, I quite like Ice Ice Maybe, a game about estimation)
• Waker
• Machinarium (this wasn’t in the presentation, but boy is it good for logic & critical thinking)
• Playing with Sequences (a non-digital game for the classroom)

Possibly Related Posts:

• What does the classroom say?
• See you at AMATYC 2011
• What skills should we be teaching to future-proof an education?
• TEDxMuskegon: A Recipe for Free Range Learning
• Ignite on the Learn This Button

Futuring

• How does consciousness change throughout history? Jeremy Rifkin on “the empathetic civilization” (RSA Animate)
• U.K. report on Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World
• You can listen to my interview with NPR’s Word of Mouth about the future of education.
• A European report: Mapping major changes to education and training in 2025 (PDF)
• 10 Changes to the World of Work in the next 10 years by Gartner Analysts
• “Beware any scenario that does not sufficient explore changing attitudes along with changing technology.” from @ericgarland [via @WorldFutureSoc]
• The Future of Video: Becoming People of the Screen [via @hrheingold and @iftf]
• Today “texting is mainstream” from fresh Pew Research stats: Texting among adult mobile phone users is up to 72%, teens at 87%.  [via @sidneyeve]

• How to crowdsource the presentation of your syllabus.
• Social Networking Made Easy (Geek&Poke cartoon about learning how to participate in “Real-World Chat“)
• Great video called What Should Everyone Know? – RSA Events interviewed all sorts of people to find out what they think is important to learn.  (8 minutes and embeddable, which means you can put it up as an announcement in your LMS)
• Email’s Dark Side: 10 Psychology Studies [via @arossett] If  you haven’t managed Inbox Zero yet, Gmail’s Priority Inbox looks pretty cool, especially for the start of the school year!  And finally, if you’re trying to get email all together, read A World Without E-mail.
• Here’s a list of all TED Talks to date.
• Some basic etiquette if you play FourSquare, from Geek&Poke.
• Great video about the “old” technology of 1986.
• Bloom’s Taxonomy according to Pirates of the Caribbean.
• Great visualization of How to Be an Expert.
• I loved @hjarche blog post about “Active Sense-making” … reminds me of my own “Random But Organized Thoughts.”

Possibly Related Posts:

• Scale of the Universe
• What skills should we be teaching to future-proof an education?
• Future of Education Interview in Unlimited
• Timeline of the Rise of Data
• Future of eLearning

Data Visualization and Mining

• “Snake Oil” is an incredibly data rich interactive data visualization.  Go play with it. You’ll see.
• I would love to see some of the stats from the Almanac of Higher Education [@chronicle] reformatted in data visualizations instead of pages of tables. Maybe this is a good project for someone’s classes this fall?
• Some blogs on data visualization: Information is Beautiful, Flowing Data, and Vizthink
• Some companies are beginning to mine the data of mood swings about their products on the Real-Time Web.
• According to Microsoft, the top three new technology majors are Data Mining, Business Intelligence, and Analysis/Statistics.  [via @flowingdata and @timoreilly]
• Google Earth now shows live weather. This is a pretty cool augmented reality visualization of data. [via @kylepace]
• The Geosocial Universe, by Jesse Thomas, shows the relative size of different social networking services as well as how much of the service is provided through mobile devices.  [via @gsiemens]
• Rapportive is an add-on for Gmail that makes email smarter by trolling for data about the contact you are emailing and then displaying some of their information.  [via @mashsocialmedia and @mcleod]

Great Links for STEM

• Repeat famous science and math experiments [via @johnfaig]
• @sciencemagazine has an article I’d like to read called “What is STEM Education?”  Of course, you can’t read it without a subscription. Bummer for us. This means I’m probably not going to take the time to look it up on my library’s system and place the order for Interlibrary loan.  Do you ever get the feeling that Academia is trying to keep us from reading their precious articles?
• A Futurama writer invented a new math Theorem just to use in the show. [via @edwebb]
• Newman’s book, Alchemy Tried in the Fire might be an interesting read for the chemists out there (and their students). [via @rpohancenik]
• There are some interesting applications of math modeling in this video about adding an augmented reality layer to Google Earth

Just for Fun

• Great video on plagiarism from Norway (a take-off on A Christmas Carol –  [via @derekbruff and @timchartier]
• Do you suffer from Information Overload Syndrome? is a very funny video from Xerox. ”IOS is highly contagious. In a matter of days, entire companies can fall victim.”
• Leadership Lessons from “The Dancing Guy” (3 minutes, an interesting observation about the importance of followers)
• Create your own Twitter Parade (and possibly drive your animals nuts).  Fun … and it was nice to see the whole crowd of followers a few at a time.
• SpatSolver is like Jing for marriages. LOL

Great Links for Everyone

• To move all your content out of Blackboard and to the open web quickly and easily, try bFree.
• How to find Royalty-free music for YouTube videos (could be helpful for student projects).
• Here’s a really nice site on Information Literacy from the University of Idaho.
• There are some great statistics in this white paper from Xerox: Cutting the Clutter: Tackling Information Overload at the Source.  While we’re on the subject of Information Overload, you might as well read Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime (NYT) [via @noahWG]
• As an Android user, I found this story to be a little unsettling.  Apparently Oracle (likened to Mordor by a friend of mine) bought Sun (which makes Java) and is suing Google over the Android OS.  There is a remote possibility that the lawsuit could force Google to pull the plug on Android.  (I said remote, right?)
• I keep saying that we’re going to have to shift higher ed away from being content providers.  Well, here’s a company hoping that you’ll want to sell your online course to other instructors or colleges. I wonder what something like will do to instructors’ ownership rights to course IP?
• I’ve been wondering off and on about whether I will leave Academia one day.  This post from Danah Boyd [@zephoria] is a great “food for thought” about why she left and how she likes her position at MS Research.
• Still one of the best explanations of Creative Commons License out there: The Mayer & Bettle Animation
• If you’re trying to teach with more of an International flavor, try these modules from the Midwest Institute.
• What leads someone to leave a following of 10,000 on Twitter?  Read: Quitting Twitter.  For the record, if you only follow 7 people, you probably don’t get much value from Twitter.  A Followers:Following ratio like 10,000:7 just shouts “all about me” to me. [via @gsiemens]
• Is professional development for educators moving the wrong direction?  [via RT @mcleod]
• How Can We Teach Someone If We Do Not Know How They Learn? Another must-read from @simbeckhampson which will lead you to a 182-page report about Learning Styles and Pedagogy.
• Westerners vs. the World: WE are the WEIRD ones.  This is seriously one of the most interesting articles I have read in a while.  Don’t skip it just because it’s last. [via @hrheingold]

• Wabash College picks a computer game (Portal) for the reading list in some of its Freshman-year seminar courses. [via @BryanAlexander]
• Farmville has more active users than twitter! “If Farmville wanted to take down productivity in the world, they could just change to a 30-min crop cycle and everything would stop.” from Seth Priebatsch’s TED on The Game Layer on Top of the World “School is a game. It’s just not a terribly well-designed game.”
• Games designed to help with real-world productivity, like the EpicWin App are intriguing.  Of course, they are only intriguing if you can actually try them.  Cross-platform please. 
• Gaming for the Greater Good: How Social Gaming Can Advance Sustainability by Derrek Mains is a MUST-READ about the potential power of social gaming. [via @randyfuj and @ricardolucas]

In other news, our Math ELITEs are ready to be used!  Here’s a picture of the new tables.  Also, my husband and I spent our 15th Wedding Anniversary sitting in front of a large screen TV (with no reception … not watching it) and watching TED Talks on a 3″ phone screen.  It was a great way to celebrate!  Also, I booked my trip to Mountain View for September. Can’t wait!

Possibly Related Posts:

• Scale of the Universe
• Timeline of the Rise of Data
• Numenko: Math Game for Arithmetic
• New Math Game: Antiderivative Block
• Giving up Calculation by Hand

• Do you teach Linear Algebra? Check out the University of Florida Sparse Matrix Collection
• If you assign online homework, you should probably be aware of one of the new ways students can cheat and their interesting (but very questionable) argument for why it’s not cheating.
• A scale-model of the solar system for a web browser. [via @davidwees]  It’s actually a bit maddening to scroll through and FIND the planets, which nails the point about how much of the model is space!
• Augmented Reality with Google Earth [via @Neogeobart] You’ll see why this is in STEM about 3 minutes in.

Other great stuff

• If you like geeky cartoons, you have to check out Geek&Poke!
• Teachers Without Technology Strike Back [via @jryoung] offers more on the digital divide when it comes to, technology and teaching. Let’s hope this professor doesn’t really see himself as the center of all knowledge in the classroom. [thanks @ppezzelle for pointing that out about the photo]
• Very interesting analysis of Los Angeles teacher data: Year after year, some teachers’ students make great strides and some do not.  Who’s teaching LA’s kids? is intriguing. Ask yourself what you’d do if you discovered your classes were falling behind the rest?
• Another interesting study finds that children who are younger than their classmates are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD.  It’s likely that we’re often confusing ADHD with simple immaturity. [via @courosa]
• It turns out that Android users use even more data than iPhone users! We may all end up with our bandwidth usage capped (let’s hope there’s always an option to pay for unlimited bandwidth for those of us without landline broadband at home). [via @hybridkris]
• A few folks on twitter were asking me about a cheap and portable data projector.  Here’s one for $300 that should do the trick (although, for the record I have not tried it myself).
• TIP: You should always download the flash version of any Prezi you plan to give as an in-person presentation.  First, once you’re duplicating your browser on another screen there are glitches in the Prezi browsing.  Second, there are still too many random down times on Prezi to take the chance that it happens during your presentation time.  Be safe: Download the flash files (free).
• NPR takes on the Beloit College “Mindset List” that is published annually, and they make some good points. [via @academicdave]
• Wired magazine has an eyecatching headline this month (big surprise): The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet.  It’s not that we’re less digital, it’s that we’re accessing the web more through applications than direct visits.  They have a great visual, which should make it worth the click. [via @eLearningGuild]
• The Face-to-face Lecture: Only Accidentally Valuable? is a great blog post by @erekbruff in response to reading Cognitive Surplus.  He poses the question: Are there activities in which higher education faculty engage that seem inherently valuable that are only accidentally valuable?
• Designing for the Mind by Francisco InChauste [via @oxala75]

Serious Games

• Glossary of gaming terms from @bigdoormedia
• TED Talk by Seth Priebatsch (who works at SCVNGR): The Game Layer on Top of the World.  He points out that “loyalty schemes” are basically a really bad game layer on the Internet.  He defines four of the seven game dynamics that can be used to get “just about anybody to do just about anything”:

1. Appointment  dynamic: a dynamic in which to succeed, one must return at a predefined time to take a predetermined action (i.e. Happy Hour, Farmville,
2. Influence and status: the ability of one player to modify the behavior of another’s actions through social pressure (i.e. Gold Medallion vs. Silver Medallion on Delta, report cards, Valedictorian)
3. Progression dynamic: a dynamic in which success is granularly displayed and measured through the process of completing itemized tasks (i.e. progress bars like on LinkedIn, World of Warcraft)
4. Communal discovery: a dynamic wherein an entire community is rallied to work together to solve a challenge (i.e. Digg, DARPA Balloon Challenge)

Great quotes

• “What looks like laziness is often exhaustion – change simply wears people out” -Dan Heath, from Why Change Is So Hard: Because Self-Control is Exhaustible (a video about why self-control is so hard, from Fast Company)
• “I don’t take attendance and don’t collect homework but I don’t think you can do well without it.” quoted from @DrTimony‘s favorite professor, who started the course with this statement.
• Why we shouldn’t restrict/ban Internet in schools: “We TEACH kids how to cross the street, we don’t ban cars!” – Jamie from #mcsli10 [via @logicwing]
• “It’s just a matter of time before Facebook becomes like Amazon: You went out with ____, you might also like ____.” from @jackscholfield
• This just made me giggle: “Since when are higher ed institutions a beacon for innovative pedagogy?” [from @mctownsley]
• “With seven game dynamics you can get anyone to do anything.” - Seth Priebatsch (from his TED Talk at TEDxBoston)  Also: “School is a game. It’s just not a terribly well-designed game.”

Events

• You might be interested in this conference Feb 27-March 1, 2011 in Banff (I am … but how to swing it in the travel budget?):  Learning Analytics & Knowledge 2011 [via @gsiemens]
• MichMATYC Fall Conference, October 15-16, 2010 at Muskegon Community College (be sure to do a search on Facebook for the MichMATYC Facebook page)

In other news, I cancelled my Kindle order because I got used to reading books on my HTC EVO (Android) and the screen sizes are not so different between the 6″ Kindle and the EVO.  I invested in a souped-up battery which should give my EVO 24 hours or more of battery life.  I’m still reading Kindle books, just not waiting for a Kindle device.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Scale of the Universe
• Numenko: Math Game for Arithmetic
• New Math Game: Antiderivative Block
• Giving up Calculation by Hand
• Measuring Teaching and Learning in Mathematics

At the end of yesterday’s presentation, I included a link to a new interactive Mindmap called “Play and Learn” (shortcut is http://bit.ly/PlayLearn).

This map is organized by subject and includes games or simulations that are available for each.  If you know of other games that are useful (focusing on high school / college age), please send them along to wyandersen at gmail dot com.

Possibly Related Posts:

• What does the classroom say?
• See you at AMATYC 2011
• What skills should we be teaching to future-proof an education?
• TEDxMuskegon: A Recipe for Free Range Learning
• Future of Education Interview in Unlimited

This is a rebuild of the Presentation I did in Texas called “Playing to Learn Math?” It is focused on a general audience in education and includes many more games and simulations than the prior version.  Before you click through, think about this …

• 99% of boys aged 12-17 play video games
• 94% of girls aged 12-17 play video games
• 50% of teens played video games “yesterday”

Pew Research, Teens, Video Games, and Civics, 2008

Since 2006, the rate of Internet use for teens aged 12-17 has been 93-94%, with roughly 40% using the Internet “Several Times a Day” (Pew Research, Millenials: A Portrait of Generation Next) The next time you have a student who says they don’t have access to the Internet, stop and consider.  To not teach students to use the Internet (and use it appropriately) is akin to leaving out a crucial job/life skill like reading.  If that same student said they “didn’t have access to books” how would you respond?  Our campuses have both computer labs and libraries. Is it unreasonable for students to be expected to use both if necessary?

Possibly Related Posts:

• What does the classroom say?
• See you at AMATYC 2011
• What skills should we be teaching to future-proof an education?
• TEDxMuskegon: A Recipe for Free Range Learning
• Future of Education Interview in Unlimited