Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/189657
Learning Teaching ideas ears ago, he taught algebra to ninth-graders who had failed the subject in eighth grade. He realized that his students did not like math but loved playing video games. They did not enjoy the drill-type games mostly available on educational software, which they considered boring. "Why not use games they already like? A happy worker is a productive worker. They want to play some games over and over that have a lot of math in them. So I did some research and wrote a grant." As one of three teachers in the U.S. to receive a $40,000 grant from the Entertainment Software Association Foundation, he started an experimental class last year using popular, nonviolent video games to teach geometry. Half of the students enrolled have "mild-to-moderate" learning disabilities, and the other half are "peer tutors" from his video game design classes. Students meet twice weekly and sometimes on Saturdays. The virtual construction fosters students' geometry skills. For example, they post signs on different types of angles in what they are building, such as right angles, congruent triangles, supplementary and complementary angles, and isosceles triangles. 48 Educator 10 Oct 2013 v2.1 int.indd 48 If you call for society to have innovation, you have to teach in a way that keeps kids interested. And if we don't keep them interested, we might miss out on a lot of talent that's out there. Brian Kenney Ivette Ochoa, Corey Griffin, and Brent Gilson work as a team developing video games as they learn math. Here they are flanked by Kunane Burns, left, and Brian Kenney, right. It's so much fun, they may not be aware they are learning math. "They can't get enough of it," says Kenney, Corona Norco Teachers Association. "Their buy-in makes my job so much easier. One special education student dropped out, and he was persuaded to come back to school because of the video game design program and playing Minecraft. He said, 'I don't want to miss this.'" Before venturing into the virtual world, students walk around the campus and measure buildings and distance between buildings with tape measures, convert to meters, and then scale their measurements to a 2:1 ratio before recreating what they have measured with virtual blocks. The hands-on math adds another dimension to their learning, as does the teamwork and collaboration that develops. His students say the innovative class makes geometry, well, real. "Geometry was a little bit hard, before," explains Ivette Ochoa, busily building a virtual locker room inside the gym. "But I get it now. I'm learned how to measure the width and length of a triangle and the area on a building using the building blocks." Samuel Rios says building the school's outdoor area near the tennis courts helped him to understand concepts of angles and triangles. O C T O B E R 2013 10/7/13 9:39 PM