This afternoon we were visiting a middle school in Brooklyn where several groups of seventh grade girls (mostly ages 12-13, all black or hispanic) were presenting their original ideas for math games. This is part of a Motorola Foundation funded project that we’re doing at the Games for Learning Institute. One of the girls showed a math puzzle containing the following algebra problem: “g \/ 6 = 36”. The goal was to figure out the value of “g”.<\/p>\n
I wondered to myself whether she was really expecting kids to know the value of 36 × 6, or was just getting the algebra wrong (ie: whether what she’d really meant to write was “g × 6 = 36”).<\/p>\n
So after her group was finished presenting its game idea, I asked her: “What’s the answer for ‘g’ in your equation ‘g \/ 6 = 36′”?<\/p>\n
With no hesitation, she replied “Six!” Alas, it was as I had feared.<\/p>\n
But then, about ten seconds later, another girl, a little 12 year old who had been very quiet up till that point, piped up — “Oh I know!” <\/p>\n
“Ok, what is it?” I asked, trying not to get my hopes up.<\/p>\n
“Two hundred and sixteen!”<\/p>\n
Which completely made my day. A happy ending after all. And maybe even a future collaborator.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This afternoon we were visiting a middle school in Brooklyn where several groups of seventh grade girls (mostly ages 12-13, all black or hispanic) were presenting their original ideas for math games. This is part of a Motorola Foundation funded project that we’re doing at the Games for Learning Institute. One of the girls showed … Continue reading “Happy ending”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6048"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6048"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6048\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6050,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6048\/revisions\/6050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}