This past week in my teacher's education mathematics course we looked at teaching the applied stream of mathematics at the high school level. Particularly we looked at the grade 9 and 10 level.
A struggle a number of educators face is the fact that the age old saying of "practice makes perfect" really does ring true for a lot of students. In mathematics specifically it is essential for students to be given the opportunity to practice and apply their knowledge and understandings. The difficult part here is that if the students are just given practice problems over and over they will generally respond with disinterest. The key to combat this is to almost hid the math in a more engaging activity.
In our class one of my college presented an activity that did exactly this. The activity was game-based learning where students were able to demonstrate their understanding of perimeter and area. The game was involved two students playing against each other on a large grid paper. The goal of the game was to shade in more space than your opponent. Before shading an area in you had to role a set of dice.The resulting numbers on the dice dictated the dimensions of the square the play would shade. Accompanying the game board was a chart that each player recorded their moves on. The progressions of this chart helped organize the students game play while visualizing the math they were using. Once the dice were rolled both numbers were recorded; one as length and one as width, then the area was calculated and lastly the perimeter was calculated. This resulted in a chart of a variety of combinations of rectangles with lengths and wides ranging from 1-6.
The valuable part of this activity, as I alluded to, the students are engaging in an almost hidden form of math.
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