In my last math class, my fellow teacher candidates presented lesson activities that were excellent examples of incorporating gaming aspects into the classroom. In senior classes it can be a challenge to make math fun for students but I can tell you that these two activities had an entire class of adult learners completely excited about playing games.
The first activity presented by my colleague was
"Deal or No Deal" for the Data Management course. In this activity student groups will be re-creating the Deal or No Deal game show and like the premise of the show they will calculate their probability of receiving an enticing offer from the banker. There was a lot of prep work done by the teacher. In each group is provided with a bristol board of cases, offer cards and 3 handouts for calculations, reflection questions and to outline the rules. After students chose the specified number of cases they were given an offer from the banker and the they to calculate probabilities of the having a case with a value greater than and less than the offer. Based on these probabilities students would either make a
Deal or
No Deal. Overall I thought this was a very fun and useful way of practicing basic probability. For future use I would try to experiment with ways I can transfer some of the game components to an online version. One way I can already see working is playing this as a class and having the case board on one PowerPoint.
The next fun activity was a classic game of
"Dominoes" and the activity was geared towards a Grade 12 Advanced Functions class so the faces on the Dominoes were Logarithms. Personally I had never played Dominoes before but it is very easy and for math people very addictive to make a match. This was an excellent way for students to practice their log laws. My colleague explained that in her class she actually used this as a warm up activity after just teaching the log laws but it can also be used later for review. Also, each time they play students can assess how they are progressing in their knowledge of log laws by tracking how much time it takes them to convert the logs to a single value. This activity can be adapted to almost every math course, instead of logs you can have equations in different forms, trig equations and angles, and solving for x.
The first activity presented by my colleague was "Deal or No Deal" for the Data Management course. In this activity student groups will be re-creating the Deal or No Deal game show and like the premise of the show they will calculate their probability of receiving an enticing offer from the banker. There was a lot of prep work done by the teacher. In each group is provided with a bristol board of cases, offer cards and 3 handouts for calculations, reflection questions and to outline the rules. After students chose the specified number of cases they were given an offer from the banker and the they to calculate probabilities of the having a case with a value greater than and less than the offer. Based on these probabilities students would either make a Deal or No Deal. Overall I thought this was a very fun and useful way of practicing basic probability. For future use I would try to experiment with ways I can transfer some of the game components to an online version. One way I can already see working is playing this as a class and having the case board on one PowerPoint.
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