I recently had a chance to talk to Emmanuel Turner, who created an interesting Twine game called Math Problem.
At first Math Problem is just like a simple multiple choice quiz - however, unlike the ones you take in school exams, Math Problem takes your wrong answer and uses it to figure out what you did wrong. For example, if I say "1 + 1 x 0 = 0," Math Problem would say "I think you tried to add before you multiply, but multiplication comes first. Try multiplying first and see what answer you get." I hired Bobo the Quote Monkey to moonlight from his job at
another blog and he came up with this:
There’s now an attitude that since a calculator or a spreadsheet can do the work for you then you don’t need to learn...the trouble is that for basic math, the time taken to use the machine is too slow and often not worth it...we want to travel next door but since we’ve come to rely on the car so much we’ve forgotten how to walk.
The full interview is
here.
I'm curious; have any of you had a chance to teach, and found your student gets the answers wrong, but in a specific way?
How do you feel about your personal experience with education and math?
