Local Lotto

Access and Equity: Promoting High-Quality Mathematics in Grades 9-12, 2018

On a crisp fall day in 2013, Mr. Thomas (pseudonym) was ready for a day of teaching at a high school in Brooklyn. He lived in Brooklyn as well, but in an affluent, White neighborhood, and he commuted to teach at this school. As he entered the school building, he nodded to the police officers flanking the metal detectors that students-nearly all of whom are Latino or Black and from low-income families-must pass through to enter school. Although the school has a high rate of teacher turnover and its fifth principal in eleven years, Mr. Thomas had been teaching there for ten years.

Local Lotto: Mathematics and Mobile Technology to Study the Lottery

McGill Journal of Education, 2000

2016

This article explores integrating place-based education with critical mathematics toward teaching mathematics for spatial justice. Local Lotto, a curricular module with associated digital tools, was designed to investigate the lottery as a critical spatial phenomenon and piloted in urban high schools. This paper describes findings from the second iteration in a remedial class in a low-income neighborhood. The research questions consider how the spatial focus supported the learning of mathematics and provided opportunities for students to think critically about the lottery using that mathematics. Findings include student interest in and engagement with the theme of the lottery familiar from outside of school with associated social justice implications. Students used mathematics and spatial evidence, at various levels of spatial scale, to support arguments about the lottery with greater success at narrower levels of scale. Suggestions about further innovations to scaffold place in a “critical pedagogy of place” in mathematics are provided.

2012 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings

Her research focuses on modeling and assessing student knowledge in the areas of science and mathematics and experimenting with new technologies for aiding assessment in distance learning. As a Co-Principal Investigator on National Science Foundation sponsored studies, she researches new ways to assess student collaboration in undergraduate engineering courses and new ways to motivate secondary mathematics learning in the context of computer game-making. Shaw was formally a software engineer in the field of computer graphics, and taught math and science as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal. She has a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Fitchburg State University and a master's degree in computer graphics from Cornell University.

Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2010

Recent United States national test results indicate a continuing need to improve K-12 student achievement in mathematics. In an effort to address this need and to expose young students to basic renewable energy concepts, we have developed an educational game called Math-City. Math-City is a simulation-based game in which students can create and maintain their own city with residential, commercial, and industrial buildings, as well as renewable and non-renewable power sources, while practicing different mathematical concepts. In this paper, we present the Math-City game along with the results of a small survey on the game with K-12 teachers.

Turkish Journal of Computer and Mathematics Education (TURCOMAT), 2012

The infusion of technology into school mathematics has intensified in the last two decades. This article discusses the effects of this infusion on the mathematics curriculum. After a review of the different roles technology plays in mathematics and the diversity of the tools and their functions in teaching and learning mathematics, an epistemological perspective is offered to understand how technology could affect our cognition and perception while doing mathematics. With this background, specific examples are offered for the ways in which our curricular goals are re-prioritized in algebra and geometry. The paper is concluded with a discussion of teachers' proficiency as a factor to promote effective use of technology in the high school mathematics curriculum based on Beaudin &Bowers' (1997) PURIA model.

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, 2012

Learning through play is fundamental to humans and to many other animals. Game Based Learning is an interactive pedagogy that has as its foundation the tenet that games, by their very nature, increase learning through positive emotional experience. This article introduces readers to what games in mathematics classes have the potential to do, including to decrease anxiety, increase motivation, and deepen learning through immersive gaming. The article then connects this theory to practice, providing examples of both computer and non-computer games in introductory middle school, high school, and college mathematics. The article analyzes how these games work, and makes the distinction between intrinsic games, in which the concept being taught is an integral part of the game, and extrinsic games, which can be used for a variety of topics and tend to be more about review than about learning new concepts.

Excitement about learning from computer-based games has been palpable in recent years and has led to the development of many educational games. However, there are relatively few sound empirical studies in the scientific literature that have shown the benefits of learning mathematics from games as opposed to more traditional approaches. The empirical study reported in this paper provides evidence that a mathematics educational game can provide superior learning opportunities, as well as be more engaging. In a study involving 153 students from two middle schools, 70 students learned about decimals from playing an educational game—Decimal Point—whereas 83 students learned the same content by a more conventional, computer-based approach. The game led to significantly better gain scores in solving decimal problems, on both an immediate (d = .43) and delayed (d = .37) posttest and was rated as significantly more enjoyable (d = .95). Low prior knowledge students especially benefitted from the game. This paper also summarizes the game's design characteristics.

2011

Mathematics achievement is an area in which American precollege students are faltering. Emerging research suggests that making mathematics instruction relevant and applicable in the lives of youth may impact math achievement, especially when it capitalizes on high-interest technologies such as video games. Employing a quasi-experimental and descriptive approach, this study examined the mathematics (i.e., numbers and operations, algebra, geometry, measurement, and probability) that middle school students employed during their design and construction of video games. First, it examined the mathematics content learned by 19 sixth and seventh graders during their analysis, synthesis, and programming of three video game projects over 7 months. Second, it measured the ability of the student programmers to laterally transfer mathematics content from the technology context of game production to the traditional context of paper-and-pencil tests. Third, it evaluated student attitudes toward ma...