Dr Shane Dye
26 October 2018
Evaluating Mathematics Games A guest post by Dr Shane Dye How can you choose the right mathematics games for your classroom? Games are engaging but sometimes that engagement distracts from the learning. Can a game be both engaging and support learning? How will you know? Dr Nic and I have been pondering those questions recently. We were developing a multiplication facts card game. The game had to be a great choice for teachers. It needed a solid educational foundation and to easily engage students. That led us to think about evaluating games for the mathematics classroom. We looked at the […]
20 August 2012
I have a problem with lecturers (and professors, teachers and instructors too, for that matter) who expect students to turn up to all lectures or give credit to students for just turning up to tutorials. Why should we dictate the way students learn? Required to turn up When I was young my father took a course at a local polytechnic. Having a young family and a job he bought the textbook, skipped the classes and studied hard at home. When he turned up to take the final exam, he was told that he was not eligible as he had not […]
14 August 2012
To help teach the skill of abstracting in Math students are given “word puzzles” which ultimately lead to a single “right” answer. The students are required to work out how to put the data from question together correctly the find the solution. These types of problems in Math can lay a poor groundwork for teaching Operations Research and (to some extent) Statistics.