UTS Digital Generation – Danny Mavromatis

I took on writing a Scratch application as my immersion task for Elective ‘E’. To avoid starting from ’scratch’ (is that where the name comes from?) I loaded an existing Maths project (solving quadratic equations) from the collaborative web site and improved it by changing the interface and adding a graph of the parabolic curve.

My fairly modest effort can be found here.

It may be interesting to recount how my efforts went. I am an experienced programmer so it didn’t take long to pick up the basics of how the coding was done and how events were handled in Scratch. The biggest difficulty I had was understanding how the ’sprites’ interacted with the ’stage’. From there things went fairly smoothly. Say about 2 hours all up. Putting in all the changes and additions I wanted took probably about another 8 hours. I would say 90% of that was fiddling with the GUI aspects of the application and the effects I wanted. Only about 10% of the time was actual coding.

Since this was a Maths application, is this something I would give to a Mathematics class? Definitely not, as there is too much superfluous activity and very little in the way of actual learning about mathematics. However, I would certainly consider it (or something similar) for an IST class.

My partner and I chose the elective ‘E’ with the immersion task of analysing a couple of games in our KLA of Mathematics. This seemed like it would be a fairly straightforward exercise. We both read “Game-Based Learning” by Richard Van Eck and were enthused to find some Maths games to play with. The article breaks the educational approach to games into three areas:
(1) Have students build games from scratch
(2) Have educators develop the games
(3) Purchase commercial off-the shelf (COTS) games

The article focuses on the latter as the best solution, at least in the short-term. However, that was clearly not an option to us because of the costs involved. So we decided to investigate if there were any free internet games that had mathematical content. First starting point was this reference in the Van Eck article to Prensky’s list of 500 “serious” games that can be used to teach different content. It turns out that there are only about two hundred games listed on the web-site and only 40 are educational. Out of those 40, there are three relating to Maths:

Algebra – The Algebots: Beat the Game, Pass the Course
Agebra – DimensionM
Math – Green Globs and Graphing Equation

The first game is “under development” and the other two require paid subscriptions. No luck there. The game DimensionM looks very promising from the screen shots and might be worth investigating in the right school environment. It is American and seems to be aligned to their curriculum but, nevertheless, it could be a useful resource.

The next possibility was to try locating suitable games for ourselves using Google with search words like “math game educational”. This took literally hours of time trying to track down promising software. In the end the results were very disappointing. We could only come up with these fairly trivial examples:

Golf – A SuperMath Game
Quadrilateral Quest
Nim Skulls

Golf seems like a simple golf game where you need to put in angles and estimate distances to play a game of golf. The documentation says that It can involve decimals and fractions but I couldn’t see that when I played it. However, it is very good for getting the students used to estimating and applying angles in a full revolution. The golf scoring system itself is useful arithmetical practice too. The game is very limited and has some design flaws. However, it could possibly be used in the Stage 4 Measurement and Space & Geometry units.

Quadrilateral Quest is, again, a fairly simple game for testing student’s knowledge of quadrilaterals (four sided shapes). It is a drag and drop Flash game where you need to match shapes with their properties and are provided with positive and negative feedback. It is more of a “drill and kill” game and very limited in its scope. It is applicable to the Stage 4 Space & Geometry unit.

Nim Skulls could not even be classified as a game. It is fairly deterministic — it’s actually more of a puzzle than a game. (Once you’ve solved the puzzle, you can win every time). It could be set as a one-time challenge in the computer lab but that’s about it.

Overall, the experience of searching for appropriate digital game-based learning (DGBL) software for Mathematics has been very frustrating. It involves way too much time for too little reward. I don’t think the average Math teacher should be expected to shoulder such a load. My feeling is that if DGBL is to be introduced in schools, in needs to be a top-down approach. DET would not to do the research and “push” any relevant resources down to the schools. Such an approach would also avoid problems with software licensing/installation and ethical issues associated with playing games as a means of gaining knowledge and skills.

The Van Eck article mentions a study undertaken in the USA in 1985 to examine how games could be used to teach varying learning levels. A total of 11 games for different grade levels were developed for the study. I wonder what became of these games? Why aren’t they around today in some form as part of the Maths syllabus? It is disconcerting and disappointing to think that no apparent inroads have been made by DGBL in the intervening 23 years.

There is a general concern in the literature about the lag in use of digital technology in the classroom compared to the informal environment outside of the school. For myself, I believe in evolution not revolution. Let the situation evolve slowly and avoid the danger of “throwing out the baby with the bathwater”. For instance, I found much of the article “Listen to the Natives” by Marc Prensky to be hyperbole. Here are some quotes:

“We in the United States need to join them [UK educators] and overcome objections that students are ‘using them [cellphones] for cheating’ (so make the tests open book!) or for ‘inappropriate picture taking’ (so instill some responsibility!)”

“Why shouldn’t our students have the same option with their education [voting with their feet] when educators fail to deliver compelling content?”

“How can we make our instruction more adaptive and, as a result, far more effective? Just ask the students; they’ll know.”

I find comments such as the above a little naïve and, frankly, disrespectful to the vast majority of existing highly professional teachers. The implication seems to be that now that new technology has surfaced in society, we have to suddenly abandon all the established methods of teaching as no longer being good enough and jump aboard the technology bandwagon.

To my mind technology is just another tool in the teacher’s toolbox that he or she can pull out as the situation requires. I have seen in my first practicum earlier this year what happens when computers are ‘thrown’ at schools and teachers not provided in-service training are asked to make use of them. They become, in effect, a ‘bludge’ lesson for teachers on Friday afternoons where they are sat in front of a PC with an Excel spreadsheet workbook and told to complete an exercise. If they finish quickly they are allowed to play games. (To be fair, the school also had access to “Mathletics” which had good ‘Flash’ based software to drill the students and ensure that they had absorbed the in-class material for a unit of work).

By Dr Geoff Romeo

This article is the text of a keynote address made in Adelaide in 2004. It starts with describing how, in Victoria, there was early adoption of computers in education. However, the forward impetus seems to have now stalled and the author is making a case that a renewed effort needs to be made in this area.

He then summarises the current state of play about effective teaching and effective learning and how our knowledge about the brain, thinking and memory has increased dramatically in recent years.

The bulk of the article is devoted to two vignettes, painting two possible pictures of how technology could be used in secondary schools in the future. Whilst both scenarios he describes are clearly and deliberately exaggerated, they serve well to make points about two different directions that technology use could be incorporated into schools and the classroom.

I have to say that, in a perfect world, we would all like our children to be students of Plainville High (and be as interested in learning as Jessica and Kimberley). Yes, the scenario is highly idealistic. However, I am convinced that at least some aspects of the technology that is depicted will eventually find their way into secondary schools. One example is the type of research that the two students have accomplished over the internet such as finding links to original documents, maps and paintings. That kind of research ability is almost with us today. The major limitation is speed but that should improve rapidly over coming years.

All in all a very entertaining and informative article!