MonkeyMagnet

Well, before teaching, I did my degree in Linguistics, which I guess makes the amount of math I teach and how much I enjoy it sort of ironic. Maybe just a bit ironic, don't you think? Before that I worked for a game company, where I would sometimes write games for special events. I've brought this love of games to my teaching, and have endeavoured to create some fun activities for the students to practice or discover a skill or concept.

I like puns and intertextual references. I've tried to bring some of these to some of my quizzes and activities to get the students a bit more interested in doing an activity that isn't just another boring worksheet or quiz. Not everything I have here fits into that, though. I also like to make the difficulty progressive, so that earlier questions lead into the later ones, and this is frequently represented in my quizzes. Some of the math quizzes have a "level 4" question on them. If the quizzes only include repeats of the questions we practiced, then I'd expect the students to get them all correct. Where does this leave the "A" level student the opportunity to exceed my expectations? So I include a question that asks the student to use the same skills or knowledge in a way that we didn't discuss in class, so that I can see who really understands the concept, and who is just following the steps laid out to solve a similar problem.

I am starting a games production business with a friend of mine who is a graphic designer. Although not all of out games will be education-based, the first few are aimed at use in classrooms to help students with math concepts. We are still working on the website, but until that is up and running, information about what we are trying to achieve can be found here: www.gofundme.com/bsgames