Technology & Games in the Classroom: Adapting Learning to the Modern Era

https://elearningindustry.com/byod-training-professionals-need-know

Hello everyone and welcome back to my blog! This week I would like to talk about something that has always caught my interest, technology and gaming in the classroom. Considering we are all twenty first century learners and are going to be teaching in the "digital age", the topic of technology in the classroom is extremely important. School boards have already adapted fairly quickly from altering their policies of no cellphones and technology allowed from when I was in school, to an open door policy of BYOD, bring your own device, which is an extreme turn around of previous policies.


It's great that school boards are advocating students to use tools that they consistently operate on a daily basis, however, it is important to keep students engaged and on track now that they have more freedom in the classroom. Depending on internet that has firewalls and blocks social media and other websites is not reliable, as my experiences volunteering in a high school quickly taught me that students just download free apps such as "Free VPN", which changes the users internet settings temporarily and allows users to get past the firewalls. Furthermore a recent article by the telegraph describes how humans have a shorter attention span thanks to the technological age, however, are able to multi task more. The article reveals how the average human attention span has fallen from 12 seconds in the year 2000 to about 8 seconds now, reinforcing the stronger need to keep students engaged in the classroom. How might teachers keep students engaged in the classroom you might ask? Its simple... by allowing students and kids do activities they like to do. Playing games.

http://www.home-speech-home.com/speech-therapy-activities-using-hedbanz.html

This week in my education class, we had the pleasure of playing several games that incorporated mathematics. The first game we played was HedBanz. HedBanz is a simple game that works around answering yes or no questions. Students are given a "headband" with a mathematical problem on it. Without looking at the problem on the card, they have to place it on their head and partner up with someone else in the class. Asking yes or no questions to their partner, they have to figure out what the problem was. In order to play this game, the students need to have a good understanding of mathematical relationships and processes, in order to get to the answer on their head. For instance in our class all the questions related to quadratic equations, and so students were asking if it was written in factored form, what degree the equation was in, if there was a vertical compression or not, and much more. In this light this is a great game for a formative assessment that keeps the students engaged. To get a better understanding of the game, watch the video from the famous Quentin Tarantino and Brad Pitt movie, Inglorious Bastards. 

http://www.askmen.com/entertainment/galleries/top-50-all-time-tarantino-characters-16.html

Although this game required students to have a lot of previous knowledge about the subject, another interactive game students can learn that is not as dependent on previous knowledge is on the mathematical app/website Desmos. Desmos is an interactive graphing calculator that students can use to graph simple and complex graphs and get a visual understanding of the subject matter. Along side Desmos is the game "Polygraph". Polygraph works similarly to the game "Guess Who", where students select a graph among 16 options and their partner has to ask yes or no questions in order to eliminate the options he or she deems unfit.

https://mathcoachblog.com/2014/12/21/class-opener-day-74-polygraphs/

This makes it a little easier for the students compared to the HedBanz game because it gives an idea of the questions students should ask rather than completely coming up with questions out of thin air. Looking at the picture on the right, you can see students have a selection of graphs that their opponent has chosen. In both games the teacher can assess student knowledge by analyzing the questions they ask. The game works by trying to get to the answer in the fewest amount of questions. In our class, the quickest solution took a student body of future math educators four questions to get to the answer.

In the 21st century, we need to cater to our students' needs. This mean incorporating games into the classroom and keeping up to date with what keeps students interested. I look forward to using the above games and much more into the classroom in the future, and for people who do not see the benefit of incorporating games into the classroom, I strongly encourage them to see the benefits of gaming in an educational context like James Paul Gee advocates below.