Me vs. The Man

This video is intended to be a teaching supplement.  If a teacher makes a lesson out of the idea presented in this video then students will be able to experience a hands-on approach to percentages and taxation.  It is meant to empower both students and parents to learn outside the classroom and not as a direct teaching tool or a replacement for proper instruction.  I have often found that when a student is struggling in mathematics and there is no further time available for me to spend with them then parents or other educators must step in and help them.  Normally at this point it is too late for a teacher to help with the catch-up work that the student must do but by providing students and parents with the resources and insights that they need to discover the material for themselves we are increasing their chances of success in the classroom later on.  With that in mind, the creation of this movie signifies the beginning of a career long search and collection of resources that can, and will, be used both inside and outside of my classroom.

Grade Stream & Strand:  Mathematics 8

Topic:  Number   

Timeline: 1 - 8 Minute Session

Big Idea:  Teachers, parents, and students alike will become become aware of new ways to understand and teach GST.

NCTM Principles and Standards for School Mathematics covered in this presentation:

1.  Number:

A)  Understand numbers.

In Grades 6-8 all students should:

- develop meaning for percents greater than 100 and less than 1;

- work flexibly with fractions, decimals, and percents to solve problems;

B)  Compute fluently.

In Grades 6-8 all students should:

- develop, analyze, and explain methods for solving problems involving proportions, such as scaling and finding equivalent ratios.

Specific Outcomes:

1.  Demonstrate an understanding of percents greater than or equal to 0%, including greater than 100%. [CN, PS, R, V]

Vocabulary Focus

GST: A 5% tax on the supply of most goods and services in Canada.  

(Canada Revenue Agency)

HST:  A harmonized sales tax replaces both the five percent federal goods and services tax (GST) and the provincial sales tax and is applied on the same basis as the GST.  

(Canada Revenue Agency)

PST: a provincial tax imposed on the consumers of most goods and particular services in a particular province.  (Canada Revenue Agency)

Works Cited:

Alberta Education. (2008). The Alberta 10-12 Program of Studies. Edmonton: The Crown in Right of Alberta.

N. C. T. M. (2012, February 9). Principles and Standards for School Mathematics. Retrieved February 9, 2012, from National Council of Teachers of Mathematics: http://www.nctm.org/standards/content.aspx?id=3742

Ward, Susan. (2012, February 9). GST. Retrieved February 9, 2012, from Small Business: Canada: http://sbinfocanada.about.com/cs/taxinfo/g/gst.htm

Special thanks to Vi Hart, Dan Meyer, and John Scammell for their inspiring work.

How things go down in my classroom

My First Scratch Encounter

            What struck me most about the completed game was the not the game itself but rather the inspiration it provided.  Almost immediately after putting the final piece of code into place I regretted not having started the project two weeks earlier since the game could have been so much bigger.  New stages, new girls, new colors, and all sorts of flashy mobs to attack and hinder my ability to avoid being kissed could have been added to this prototype.  It was almost next to impossible to stop adding things to the game with so much creativity bursting forth from within.  Why would this project have struck me as such?  Perhaps it was the hours and hours of entertainment it provided or the soul-sucking decoding I had to endure.  But if a source of this inspiration has to found I feel as though it isn’t the flashy women or the funny plot that makes the learning so addictive, it’s the physics. 

            At first it was just to see if I could get a character to move back and forth on the screen, but it soon evolved into a fully controllable, avatar.  I could jump, speed up, slow down, and interact with different objects.  Surely I could have recreated Mario with this type of dominion over the virtual world.  Wielding my omnipotence became an obsession as I began to make decisions that sculpted what my final project would ultimately become.  My ultimate goal in beginning this project became the use of the physics that this character had achieved in order to create an entertaining and challenging game that could be enjoyed by anyone with a computer.

            The problems I encountered were not programming problems because I have been familiar with computers for years now and have previously taken programming classes.  They were creativity problems.  Here I must give credit to my classmates and their ideas.  Even though I did all the coding myself I cannot express how much inspiration and learning came out of our brainstorming sessions during class.  During the beginning stages, when Calvin could only jump straight up and down, I received a piece of advice that changed the game entirely.  “It would be cool if he could jump over and across something!” he said.  Within five minutes my character was bounding across the screen.  “You should build platforms and see how high your character can climb!”  Several hours later there were platforms floating up and down my screen.  There were nearly more beta tests by other people than tests by me, they seemed to egg me on.

            To be honest, I’ve had professors who tell me exactly what a project needs.  Who create marking schemes based on their exact specifications.  But I don’t learn much from those professors.  When it was said that we must make a game, and that it needed to be creative, and that for our sakes they were not going to show us a game that had been previously made in this class because it had stifled creativity in the past, my heart skipped a beat.  Finally, an undisturbed nesting ground for learning!  “This program is capable of doing a lot of things.  Make it do something cool!” is how I envision summarizing this project.  As opposed to: “Make a game where you must kill three enemies before you can win.”  Not only was I inspired to create something unique, I was also invited to use all the tools at my disposal within the Scratch program regardless of my skill in programming.  I feel as though I learned more about student motivation from this project than I did about programming in Scratch.

            The only thing that another programmer might have done, that I didn’t, was to add sound effects to my game.  Simply put, sound effects would have driven me up the wall during the hours that I spent decoding my game and so I chose not to include any.  I did receive feedback from one beta tester on their inability to know when they had hit Carmen with a snowball.  Sound might have been one solution but I think my solution is better; a visual cue.  Creating more than one solution to a problem I something I think should be a part of classrooms today.  With so many resources at our disposal it is easy to find one great solution to a problem and stop there.  But the truth is that for every problem, even math problems, there is a plethora of correct solutions and we must not get stuck thinking that every single one of our students is going to think exactly the same as us.  I am reminded of the diversity of our students.  One student may understand fractions and decimals almost instantly while another needs visual and audial cues in order to really grasp what is happening in a problem.  My main point here is that the people who beta tested my game still know that they are being hit by kisses even though there is no sound in my game.