Week 6 EDET S637 Differentiated Instruction Through Technology
Essential question: How are games providing new opportunities for differentiation in the classroom?
Gamification, adding game-like qualities to a setting, creates motivation and interest for all ages. Gamification provides ways to teach to the individual students’ desires and needs. For example, in Mario Kart the character in last place gets the strongest boosts versus the character who is winning in the race gets a minor support/help in the game. Ultimately, in the classroom this is exactly what differentiation is by providing the low students an opportunity to catch up with their peers. According to Oprescu, Jones, and Katsikitis, gamification can influence the work environment (for us school environment) by “increasing personal satisfaction and enhanced wellbeing”, “develop professional and organizational capabilities”, and “enhance productivity.” (2014) The elements of games that enhance the classroom by motivating students that Matera has explained are theme, setting, characters, and action. More specifically the elements include experience points, levels, leaderboards, guilds, onboarding (familiarizing students to the game), badges, power ups, quests, items, skills, currency, micro-challenges, life jackets, trade, etc. (2015)
Get the Math is a resource for teachers to bring games into the classroom for Algebra classes put together by THIRTEEN Productions LLC (2017). The website has students looking at math in in music, fashion, basketball, videogames, restaurants, and special effects. By having this website in my resources, students can discover math concepts in various interests that may have creating a differentiated learning environment towards students’ interests in a game format. The Restaurant Challenge has students using past data points of cost of the avocado in the last few years to help make an accurate estimate of what the meals with avocado should cost for the next menu. Then students can use this process to do the same for other meals. I like this website because students learn math through a medium that they are used to and are interested in: videos. How many videos do you watch on Facebook per day? I counted how many I watched today and it was 7 videos (this is trying to mindful of my data). This is differentiating the classroom by making it a challenge and using technology to bring it to the students.
Another part of mathematics that can be easily put into a game is coding. This weekend I went to ASTE (Alaska Society for Technology in Education) in Anchorage and there were many resources of how to teach coding in the classroom. The one that I found most helpful was made by Apple as an application on the iPad called Swift Playgrounds. The app teaches students to learn the Swift coding language by leveling up to a new playground. The first playground starts with students writing the code to move the character forward and to collect a gem. Right away students are learning the main concepts of coding such as parentheses after a function, for example moveForward() or collectGem(). After each learned concept of coding, the student levels up. There are also opportunities for students to challenge themselves such as doing the course in a shorter amount of steps. I have made a video of the app and the process that the students take which take on a game like quality.
References
Apple. Swift Playgrounds. http://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/
Matera, M. (2015). Explore like a pirate. San Diego, CA: Dave Burgess Consulting, Inc.
Oprescu, F., Jones, C., & Katsikitis, M. (2014). I PLAY AT WORK—ten principles for transforming work processes through gamification. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 14. http://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.
THIRTEEN Productions LLC. (2017). Get The Math. Funded by The Next Generation Learning Challenges and The Moody’s Foundation. http://www.thirteen.org/get-the-math/the-challenges/math-in-restaurants/see-how-the-teams-solved-the-challenge/180/
Mariah, I really enjoyed your video that you posted. I found it very informative. Thanks to you I plan to check out how to incorporate coding into my classroom. I noticed you talked about math, so I plan to research and contemplate how I can fit this into my math curriculum. Thanks, again. Love your enthusiasm about the app.
ReplyDeleteWhat do you teach? Coding connects to math in plenty of ways. One way that I can think of is that coding builds on top of each other. New language or a new function is made by composing (putting together) other functions that were already made such as in the original language. In math, this is a basic truth and happens all the time. For example, multiplication comes about through repeated addition. In coding on the Swift Playgrounds app, turning right comes about through turning left three times. It really is a great app and its intent is for grades 4-9.
DeleteThe Swift coding looks very similar to Code Monkey. If I remember, you did very well in my presentation playing that! I would like to teach coding in my math classes. There seems to be no time after teaching the required curriculum to do fun stuff like coding. I know there is a push to teach coding in school by different organizations. I don’t know if you had a chance to look at the video game section in Get the Math, but it was great to see how to move the spaceship to different coordinates and determine the equation of the line to move it.
ReplyDeleteMariah,
ReplyDeleteI also believe that games provide many avenues of teaching for different levels of student learning. I had never heard of Get the Math resource. I loved all the options that the site has listed and the challenge features too. I love the Swift Playgrounds site too, that would have made my coding classes easier.
Thanks for sharing,
Josie
Josie- I haven't had the opportunity to take a coding class but do have a way better sense of what coding is now that I played on the app. I love it!
DeleteHaving learned Basic Coding when I was younger thanks to some innovative thinking on my Dad's part and then taking two Computer Science classes in high school, I think there really is something to incorporating the learning of coding into a game based environment. When I was 6, most of my friends had Ataris and my sister and I really wanted one. Begging my dad, however, did not good. He was firm that we had all the computers we needed (HE had a Commodore 64 and a Commodore Plus4 we weren't really allowed to use). At some point, our whining got to him and he told us he would compromise (HAH!). The next day he came home with a basic programming magazine and told me that if I typed in this program, I would have a game. I spend days, I mean DAYS, typing in the code, troubleshooting my mistakes, etc. to code a program that would allow a skier to ski downhill and your job was to make sure he avoided the trees. Now I can laugh at how my Dad tricked us, but at the time, the days of coding was SO worth it. Further, when I got to high school computer science, I had a basic understanding of the coding process, how to troubleshoot, the persistence required to build a program, etc. Given that I learned all of that in an environment that was fun because I was building a game, I think having it already in a game is a great way to engage students and encourage them to keep trying. I fully agree with the readings that discussed tenacity and persistence as two of the best characteristics of gamers. Thank you for sharing Swift Playgrounds!
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