
Video Game Helps Math Students Vanquish an Archfiend -  Algebra  - wumi
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/08/nyregion/08video.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin
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henning
At this age, many students in India are learning calculus. And they are not
learning the product rule or integration by parts with a video game.

I wonder if you could motivate Johnny and Jane by showing them what Pradeep
and Rajit, their future job competition, are up to.

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pchristensen
_I wonder if you could motivate Johnny and Jane by showing them what Pradeep
and Rajit, their future job competition, are up to._

Probably not. I remember being scared of the Japanese because _everything I
bought_ was made in Japan. I think the main Indian exports like IT services
are so much less visible to kids that age. Most 'tweens probably just think of
Indians as the people with the red dot.

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tocomment
Why can't they make some kind of role playing game where have to actually use
math to progress in the game, for example calculate, slope, gravity etc for
targetting, build a machine to up and incline, but you need to know the slope,
etc.

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gambling8nt
The pace of such games is too low to be interesting or effective.

Also, students of this age will be more inclined to guess if you include any
sort of graphical cues at all.

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dangoldin
I'm not sure how I feel about this. It does get kids to learn the material and
makes it fun for them by adding competition and entertainment but I'm not sure
this is good for the long term.

This is just addressing the wrong problem. These kids won't be interested in
math for math's sake but are just doing to play a game - isn't it much better
to get them interested in math without a need for games?

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hugh
_isn't it much better to get them interested in math without a need for
games?_

The problem is: a lot of mathematics at this level _is_ actually pretty boring
but needs to be mastered anyway. The fun stuff doesn't come until late high
school at the earliest, and mostly happens at the university level.

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dangoldin
That's true but I think the issue lies in how slowly mathematics is taught:
when you spend all of elementary and middle schools repeating the same
material over and over. During elementary school I used to change all the
minuses to pluses on the homeworks since I didn't like subtract but I was
doing basic algebra (basic polynomials) before I entered elementary school. At
that point I was reading interesting math books for fun. I was able to find
some math puzzle books and was slowly making my way through those.

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hugh
Your experiences aren't really typical, then, and neither are my own. It's
probably a mistake to extrapolate from our own childhoods to try and figure
out what will work best for the vast majority of people.

