THE has a nice little story about what a school in the US is finding with it’s game integration in Math. I think the kicker is here:
Hobson emphasized that the product doesn’t change the math concepts that are being taught. The year before adopting Tabula Digita, a group of Georgia schools had already been working toward changing the way they were teaching math, to take better advantage of instructional technology tools. “It’s not that we’re conceptually losing parts of math or making it easier,” Hobson stressed. Rather, “we believed we could actually make [math] a richer experience. Kids would have better conceptual understanding of math through the use of tools, rather than just doing problems from a book.
It’s nothing special about learning from the game, it’s about learning concepts and using tools that helps students in the end. The “real world” doesn’t have answers in the back of a book, so why do we insist so strongly that we teach our children that way? Granted, if we only show one “tool”, students will try to solve every problem with that tool, so I think to avoid this, we would be well advised to also provide context and process to the tool and it’s use to solve a given problem. This explanation should also be more than “just ’cause”. There should be a concerted effort to use constructivist principles to help ensure that students are able to at least get the basics when dealing with new material, regardless of how concrete or abstract.
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