Video Game Helps Math Students Vanquish an Archfiend - Algebra | Hacker News Reader

Video Game Helps Math Students Vanquish an Archfiend - Algebra

nytimes.com

11 pointswumi9 comments

At this age, many students in India are learning calculus. And they are not learning the product rule or integration by parts with a video game.

I wonder if you could motivate Johnny and Jane by showing them what Pradeep and Rajit, their future job competition, are up to.

I wonder if you could motivate Johnny and Jane by showing them what Pradeep and Rajit, their future job competition, are up to.

Probably not. I remember being scared of the Japanese because everything I bought was made in Japan. I think the main Indian exports like IT services are so much less visible to kids that age. Most 'tweens probably just think of Indians as the people with the red dot.

Why can't they make some kind of role playing game where have to actually use math to progress in the game, for example calculate, slope, gravity etc for targetting, build a machine to up and incline, but you need to know the slope, etc.

The pace of such games is too low to be interesting or effective.

Also, students of this age will be more inclined to guess if you include any sort of graphical cues at all.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. It does get kids to learn the material and makes it fun for them by adding competition and entertainment but I'm not sure this is good for the long term.

This is just addressing the wrong problem. These kids won't be interested in math for math's sake but are just doing to play a game - isn't it much better to get them interested in math without a need for games?

My generation was no different, only we called it Number Munchers.

I'm more concerned that they're pretending to be futuristic soldiers and shooting at each other. That would not have been my first choice of game mechanic, and I'm not sure I'd want my kid spending hours a day doing that.

Anyway, these look good for drills, but where's the Robot Odyssey for this generation?

isn't it much better to get them interested in math without a need for games?

The problem is: a lot of mathematics at this level is actually pretty boring but needs to be mastered anyway. The fun stuff doesn't come until late high school at the earliest, and mostly happens at the university level.

That's true but I think the issue lies in how slowly mathematics is taught: when you spend all of elementary and middle schools repeating the same material over and over. During elementary school I used to change all the minuses to pluses on the homeworks since I didn't like subtract but I was doing basic algebra (basic polynomials) before I entered elementary school. At that point I was reading interesting math books for fun. I was able to find some math puzzle books and was slowly making my way through those.

Your experiences aren't really typical, then, and neither are my own. It's probably a mistake to extrapolate from our own childhoods to try and figure out what will work best for the vast majority of people.

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