IEP Project

My content area is Secondary Mathematics.  I have exactly one student in my school currently at a Secondary Mathematics level; he is learning Algebra.  As such, it's understandably difficult for him to feel any competition when it comes to math.  There is no bell curve for him to place himself on (at least on a daily basis).  I discuss this issue in a little more depth in my IEP write-up, but the gist of the situation is that I challenged myself to learn enough algebra games to be able to be able to keep my student "competing" with himself.  He has grown up in a gaming world, and "beating the game" is something he understands and self-motivates himself to do.  I wanted to be savvy enough to be able to tap into that self-motivation on the part of my student.

The games I trained on were:

• The Algebots
• Order of Operations
• Solve for X
• Connect Four
• Equation Buster
• Function Machine
• Linear Function Machine
• Gem Game

The results of my training and my plans on how to implement what I learned are in my write-up, but the upshot is, there are a lot of easy-to-learn, easy-to-play games out there for teaching algebra concepts.  None of them are Nintendo or X-Box level games; instead, they are suited for short blocks of time, just like teachers find every week in real classrooms.  Pulling this into my teaching will not only help my planning, but should (hopefully) help turn the non-glamourous math lessons into memorable activities.  With any luck, these games will help make algebra concepts stick with my student for a long, long time. 

Online Community, Part II

I poked in on the folks over at The Math Forum @ Drexel time to time throughout the quarter.  My favorite aspect of that site is the plethora of math puzzles that pop up in the various discussion groups.  I use thinking puzzles as "extra credit" points every day before lunch in my school.  The students all compete to figure out the problem first, and when I need a good math puzzle, this was a good site to troll through.  I had intended to post on the site, but never did, probably because my highest math student currently is lower algebra, and I didn't get stuck much.  My online habits as far as forums go have been forming for years, and it proved to be a bit hard to break that mold.  Typically, I post in forums when I have a problem I can't find a solution to by searching the forum first (good net-etiquitte not to double-post a problem).  I also try to "give back" to a forum by posting answers where I can help, but the people on this forum are pretty johhny-on-the-spot, and I didn't have occasion to add original feedback.

In general, I love forums, and have been using them for a long time.  With the advance of good search features (over the news-group days), forums like this one are very helpful for picking the brains of people all over the world.