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Relevancy Learning
A Letter To Principles And Teachers
Hi Gary
Jim Smith from Super Smart Learning Centers
It was great meeting with you the other day and after I left your office
I began thinking more about what you were asking. "Does programming help students with math?" I don’t think my answer was very complete lol.
What my personal experiences with my coding programs has shown me is, that if students have a programming challenge that involves math , as long as it involves solving a problem for their video game they are very willing to engage in solve the problem. I’m quite convinced that because it is immediately RELEVANT to them they are happy to engage.
And Relevancy is known to be a key condition for learning.
See the following Ted Talk for a full list: The Surprising Truth About Learning in Schools | Will Richardson | TEDxWestVancouverED https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxyKNMrhEvY
As a private teacher (and constant learner) engagement has always been of a primary concern,
bored students don’t perform!
Consider this question for students:
Write a program for a yogurt shop to process the sale of frozen yogurt.
The sale price for frozen yogurt is $0.39 per ounce. The sales tax is 8.25 percent.
While the above question is totally logical and useful it would be interesting to ask students the following question;
How many magical flowers does your character have to collect to buy a magical set of wings, given the following information. Magical flowers are worth 0.39 gold units . The wizard charges 8.25 percent gold units to create the wings. A set of magical wings cost 10 gold units.
Of course not all math needs to be related to a video game etc But given a choice of questions to answer , it would be interesting to see What student s choose .
While I got honours all during high school , I just don’t remember being Interested or enjoying math.
I think if we had video games "back in the day", my math skills would have soared!
Anyway those are just some thoughts I had. That Ted Talk is interesting.
Thanks For Listening Jim Smith