In today’s society, technology continues to grace the world with its everyday advances. One of the advances being, educational online games, that can be beneficial for students and teachers. Even if this is the case, not all of these games meet the criteria needed to serve as a valid resource in the classroom. For this reason, finding online games that have the ability to keep students engaged, while effectively teaching the lesson, can be difficult.
During the process of evaluating various educational games, a rubric was created in order to properly assess them. The creation of the rubric was fairly complicated, only because it needed to fit the standards of both the teachers and the students. Teacher concerns surrounded the educational aspects of the game and whether or not the game targeted key concepts in their classrooms. Meanwhile, student concerns surrounded the fun, colorful, and musical aspects of the games. Moreover, a combination of all these criteria was needed in the rubric. The group took into consideration all of the different subjects covered in the classroom, and then narrowed it down to the subject of math. With math being one of the subjects that does not easily maintain the attention of the students, the group figured that a math game was the perfect option.
The math estimation game called, “Ice, Ice Maybe”, managed to engage the group, while allowing each person to brush up on their math skills. The game used animals as tools to motivate the students to move on to the next level and the colorful aspects of the game also played a motivational role. The incorporation of addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, fractions, and percentages as well as providing levels for the students to choose from, showed the games ability to reach out to different age levels and students struggling in a particular category of math.
“Ice, Ice Maybe,” is a game that teachers should consider using in their classrooms. Not only is it fun, it provides students with the opportunity to use their critical thinking skills with the provided math categories to chose from, problem solving skills, through the process of estimation while being timed, and sufficient decision making in order to move on to the next level (NETS, 2007). For those reasons, teachers could clearly identify the game to meet one of the net standards for students, as well as meet various curriculum standards for math in the classroom (NCTM, 2011). With a game that has the ability to meet student standards as well as teacher standards, students will eventually learn to love math.
International Society for Technology in Education. (2007) NET Standards for Students.
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (2011) National Math Curriculum Standards
Hi:
ReplyDeleteWhy did you NOT hyperlink the title to the game?
-j-