The Value of Video Games in the Classroom - Dan Meyer

In a recent post by teacher Dan Meyer (also mentioned in my last blog), he decided to find out why his students liked video games so much, by playing a lot of them! Here are some of his conclusions:

Video Games & Making Math More Like Things Students Like

December 16th, 2014 by Dan Meyer

These are the six lessons I learned:

1. Video games get to the point.
2. The real world is overrated.
3. Video games have an open middle.
4. The middle grows more challenging and more interesting at the same time.
5. Instruction is visual, embedded in practice, and only as needed.
6. Video games lower the cost of failure.

Turn Bland Math Problems into Interactive Classrooms, with Multimedia

Math teacher Dan Meyer has an interesting TED Talk, where he begins by saying he's talking about a subject he loves to a captive audience of students who hate it, but are required to take the course (often remedial learners).

Eventually, he leads into a line problem in the familiar format,

• deletes the information, and
• instead runs a video of filling a large tank with water.
  

After several boring minutes, the curious students ask how long it will take to fill (the exact math problem), and are led into a highly interactive, enthusiastic search for the answer -- eventually solved by viewing the last frame in the film. Meanwhile, the students take guesses, which are placed on the board, and find out if they're right!

1. Dan Meyer cuts down the information presented. Students generate it and filter out what's needed and not.
2. He leads them into formulating the problem (as Einstein and Herb Simon have mentioned is one of the major parts of solving any problem).

   The real world of human decisions is not a world of ideal gases, frictionless planes, or vacuums. To bring it within the scope of human thinking powers, we must simplify our problem formulations drastically, even leaving out much or most of what is potentially relevant...problem solving and decision making is centrally concerned with how people cut problems down to size - Herb Simon

3. Dan Meyer recommends the use of multimedia -- plentiful these days!
4. He turns the problem into a story.

Here's the link to the 11-minute talk: Dan Meyer's TED Talk: Math Class Needs a Makeover

Black MIDIs

There are now MIDI files that are so big, the music can't be played.

MIDI is a standardized way that digital sources (computers, electronic keyboards, digitized musical scores, musical instruments/voice speaking through a digital controller, or other MIDIs, etc.) can create music through a synthesizer, without musicians playing any instruments, although MIDI-controlled electronic music can be mixed together with living musicians.

Here's a link to a post about black MIDIs, where the notes grow so thick, it creates a black visual pattern or dense cloud on the screen! Sometimes it is composed of Millions of notes!  Composers may try to surpass each other in ways that don't have much to do with music!

1. Maximizing the size of the download (such as creating a terabyte file - a billion billions) or
2. Boasting about the fact that their computers are so grand that they are able to play the huge file they created!

Follow this link to try Jingle Bells and the descriptive video at the top:

Black MIDI Songs will kill your brain and your computer (Well, it's not actually that bad!)
http://m.aux.tv/news/62071-black-midi-songs-will-kill-your-brain-and-your-computer

What's the Scarcest Resource?

Surprisingly, the famous software/hardware designer and author, Dr. Fred Brooks, says that what holds up projects usually isn't money....

Brooks: The critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest resource. Despite what you may think, that very often is not money. For example, in a NASA moon shot, money is abundant but lightness is scarce; every ounce of weight requires tons of material below. On the design of a beach vacation home, the limitation may be your ocean-front footage. You have to make sure your whole team understands what scarce resource you’re optimizing. 

from a 2010 Wired Magazine article:    http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/07/ff_fred_brooks/

He is called "the father of the IBM 360" (a major leap forward in computer hardware)

and author of The Mythical Man-Month:

You can’t accelerate a nine-month pregnancy by hiring nine pregnant women for a month. Likewise, says University of North Carolina computer scientist Fred Brooks, you can’t always speed up an overdue software project by adding more programmers; beyond a certain point, doing so increases delays.  

Mobile Pocket Projectors

This describes a mobile Pocket Projector, created by the head of the MIT Media Lab, Ramesh Raskar. I'm adding this here because it would be useful for a mobile Landmarks game.  Once the student/gamer finds the right location, several fake RFID tags could be posted in different directions, seen from the same spot or street intersection.

http://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar/pocket.html

This could be used to register whether the student/gamer had arrived at the right spot to see the landmark or view.  Also, they should take a picture of what they see and the software should be able to compare whether it's the same view, within a certain amount of leeway ("tolerance").  Using RFID tags posted on lampoles, etc. would pin down someone's success or failure quicker, because image recognition by computer software is still tricky.

Working together on the educational game set FunFunctions

Summary:

• Many of the following ideas also apply to the FunFunctions development project, at this stage of open source programming and preliminary discussions.
• The MIT Media Lab has impressed at every turn, such as when I viewed their products in the Evolving Technology section of SIGGRAPH, appearing year after year with something new, such as projected stories slipping off the edges of a table as you tilt it and a miniature spinning 3d house in a glass cube that morphs when confronted with a math equation (cos, sin, etc.).
• R. Keith Sawyer is in another blog entry.

The following is from Kyle Welche's blog, at http://kylewelch.wordpress.com/2013/06/15/the-mit-media-lab/

MIT Media Lab

"The MIT Media Lab is something of an anomaly in academia.  It breaks down walls that constrain nearly all institutions of higher education.  First, it is deliberately interdisciplinary.  Whereas most graduate programs tend to focus on intra-departmental synergy more than inter-departmental synergy, the MIT Media Lab draws experts from a wide variety of fields, spanning the arts, sciences, and communications.  Rather than maintaining a uni-disciplinary lab, they have developed an intellectual ecosystem that produces ideas and permutations that can only collaborative diversity can create.
...
Additionally, the Lab favors collective ownership over individualism.  Rather than adopting the traditional academic route that rewards individuals for publishing more than their peers, the Lab does focuses on projects large enough to not consolidate credit to a single person. Additionally, collective IP ownership of products includes faculty, students, and their corporate sponsors.
...

The Media Lab’s organization revolves around specific goals.  The body of faculty, students, and sponsors is divided into teams that are dedicated to specific projects.  All research, design, and development is centered on tangible outcomes.  A list of current projects (some of which are staggeringly bold) can be found here.

The first of Sawyer’s key flow-enabling conditions is the concept that a group must be focused on a specific goal.  Sawyer notes that flow is catalyzed when a group has 'a compelling vision and a shared mission' (44). "

-----------------------

Sawyer, K. (2007). Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration. New York, NY: Basic Books. ISBN-13;978-0-465-07192-0.

SmalLab - Situated Multimedia Arts Interactive Learning - one way to develop kinetic learning ideas in 3D

Interactive learning - primary and middle school students - out of their seats, in kinetic learning.
Summary:
1. First video shows example.
2. For developers - free download of 3d game engine
3. Ideas of what to put in it?
4. To make it math/science, it needs numbers and measurement.
Flow brings embodied learning to any existing Interactive Whiteboard or projection surface. Using motion-capture technology - similar to the Xbox Kinect™ - students’ bodies are the interface in Flow. Students use their hands in real 3D space to manipulate images, sounds, text, and graphics. This kinesthetic engagement opens new pathways to learning.

For example, in the Color Mixer Scenario, groups of three students collaborate control the amount of red, green, and blue light that is mixed in a virtual spotlight.  By raising and lowering their arms, they can see a dynamic mix of colors, hear the impact of their actions, and feel the relationship between gesture and how a variable changes.

2. SMALLab Learning Developer Program has free downloads of the Unity 3D game engine and they are looking for ideas!

3. Comment with your ideas for apps to develop!

This is centered in Hollywood, CA, but a system was bought by a local school system (Elizabeth, PA) and McKeesport, PA, very close to me, will soon be adding the $34,000 system! http://triblive.com/neighborhoods/yourmckeesport/yourmckeesportmore/4680784-74/smallab-classroom-learning#axzz2ejtj50p6