Too Cool

On any given day, there are at least 10-15 students that desire to come to my room to hangout, and will wait by my door to do so. This does not include the extra 10 that make walk-in demands. I do not tell these students to come upstairs. They wait by my door on their own. At least unlike last year, I can actually manage so many students now, however, I no longer have a lunch period! I try to create a list for all of the students that would like to go downstairs and get lunch, but there are just too many. Although it's not my fault, my apologies to any of my co-workers that this is causing trouble for! On the days in which I have the video games, there are even more students. Last Friday all 25+ seats were full! I am extremely exhausted, not only with school and my thesis, but the end of the year quality review, my bulletin, as well as the end of the school year.

On the bright side, I have undoubtedly been successful with getting students to play "games" (and I put this in quotation because they are no longer games in the sense where the only thing gained from playing is solely entertainment) that require them to critically think. First with square dice, and now Dragonbox. Students are extremely anxious to come upstairs for lunch and continue their accounts in Dragonbox. This is awesome. If they continue to play these types of games that I have played when I was their age, their critical thinking skills will be superb by the middle of next year. I am already confident that many of them have done a great job with the exam and will be prepared for the net school year.

Mario Kart 8 and Statistics Part II

Lesson #53 - Statistical Questions With Mario by MR.E

Mario Kart 8 & Statistics

It's been tough to update as I have been trying my best to juggle chapter 6 of my thesis as well as prepare students for the state exam. I have absolutely no time as of late. We will be working on a unit focusing on probability and statistics after the test. I want the students to be able to answer statistical questions surrounding Mario Kart 8, and use the data gathered from their races to learn statistical concepts.

Mean, median, mode, range, box plots of their data, etc. Perhaps we can answer a question like "are the girls or boys more likely to score higher in a race of Mario Kart 8?" or "what is the average time it takes (insert class here) to complete a race in Mario Kart 8?" There are so many things that can affect the data (items, computers or no computers, stage difficulty), and this serves as a good discussion to have with the kids. What's best is that ALL students can access this because all that's required is for you to play! I have a bit more planning to do to figure out how things will run, but I'm excited and I'm sure they'll be excited too.

From Dragonbox to Equations

Dragonbox Takes off

Originally intended to be just a project, Dragonbox has certainly taken off with 603. From 6 iPads to all of the laptops in the cart! What I love about the game is it really is as though you're being ranked. The further you get in the game (without help), the stronger you are. For the students that have completed the first Dragonbox, I have purchased the 2nd one (age 12+) for the computers in the cart.

It will be interesting to see how this transfers onto 7th grade. The next few posts will be a quick (or not so quick) peek into how the game can help with algebra.

Back from Tokyo

I have been away from the blog for a while! Not only have I been trying my best to prepare the students for the Common Core State math exam next week, I took a trip to Japan during Spring break. I am STILL jetlagged and have gotten no more than 4 hours of sleep the past few nights.

In addition to the Spring Break homework packet, I am giving another packet this weekend that will cover adding decimals, quadrants, inequalities, unit rates and absolute value.

Our next unit is statistics and I want to use Mario Kart 8 to be our source for gaining data. Perhaps we can work towards finding out the fastest players or the fastest class, and use data from the game (the time it takes students to complete a race) to learn stat topics such as mean, median, mode, box plots, stem/leaf, etc.