When people hear you are a math major, their response is usually along the lines of:
“Wow, you like math? Good for you; I could never do that.”
We seem to be noticing, as time goes on, less and less enthusiasm for math. Often, this is not because of the content, but rather, because of the way that it is presented. In a research article by Jair J. Aguilar, “High School Students’ Reasons for disliking Mathematics: The Intersection Between Teacher’s Role and Student’s Emotions, Belief and Self-efficacy,” we see the statistic that out of 350 participating students in grades 11-12 from a school in northern Mexico, 21% said they disliked math because of a “lack of interest or apathy” in the subject matter. Is there a solution to this? What is a way that students can have an interest in the content and applications without actually changing the content itself? Well, one possible answer to this question is gamification.
What exactly is gamification? To put it simply, gamification adds a game-like element to a task such as student homework, therefore encouraging engagement and participation. A couple of weeks ago, our Technology for STEM Educators class had a guest speaker, Dr. Kevin Smith from Dakota State University, come and talk to us about gamification in the math classroom. He led us through examples of different ways to implement this strategy in our own classrooms as future math teachers. As a whole, we found these exercises fun and interesting as well as a great way to get to have a more positive mindset about math.
Now, knowing this classroom teaching method, where do we go from here? According to Karen from the Naturally Creative Classroom blog, five possible ways to incorporate gamification into your classroom include:
- Friendly competition
- Offering rewards
- Creating teams for learning and collaboration
- Using a game-like tracking system, such as experience points
- Game-like terms, for example: homework is a task, test is a quest, etc.
There are also different online resources that teachers can access, such as Prodigy, Quizizz, and Happy Numbers. These can be tailored to contain different types of content for different grade levels to fit the needs of students.
As previously stated, there is a trend of students being disinterested in math, with a high percentage of this being a result of finding the content disinteresting. There are many options to explore in order to solve common complaints about math being boring and not having future applications in the lives of students, and one of these is gamification. Gamification gives us, as teachers, a chance to positively influence students to find interest in the subject of math.
Carson Haak, Rose Gutenkauf
Links to articles and websites referenced:
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1327942.pdf
https://www.prodigygame.com/main-en/
https://happynumbers.com/?redirect=no
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