EDET679 Gamification Week 11 Blog

EDET679 Gamification Week 11 Blog

Essential Question: What is the game you are thinking of writing up for your classroom?

            In order to introduce and teach history of mathematics in my classroom, my theme of the game will be during a future time in which all knowledge of the past and more specifically all foundational mathematics has been forgotten. There are many technologies and everyone living in this time knows how to use it but the memory of how the technologies were created became lost. Each student in the class became of age this year to enter into the class of solving what has become known as “the math gap”. The community believes that in the next four years of their lives, the students must figure out why the world as they know it has lost their memories. If they don’t not solve “the math gap” in the four years, their brains will be fully developed and will not be able to attack the problem again.

            When children of age go to “the math gap” class, a magical thousand-year-old Möbius Strip sorts them into a guild of which they will be with for the rest of their time in school. The guilds are Statisticians, Theoretical Mathematicians, and Scientists. Each student is also given a new name by the Möbius Strip. My students are all given names of famous mathematicians and scientists from the past but no one knows how significant this is because not one person on Earth remembers these names.

            At school, students learn secrets by being number one on the leaderboard between the guilds and between individual students. The head professor will award groups who work together cohesively and use the math vocabulary frequently among other things. The head professor awards individual students for successfully completed tasks, who show leadership qualities, and other things that show promise of solving “the math gap”. Each student has the ability to gain items that will help them get closer to helping the world remember the lost mathematics. Items might include the use of a multiplication chart, the use of a calculator, the ability to eat food to energize the brain, or the ability to “remember” a formula (through a prepared formula sheet).

            Students are able to go on to side quests given by the head professor. Sometimes these quests seem far-fetched but they are often set to get students to strive because no student will solve “the math gap” unless they are able to fail and get back to work diligently.