Sunday, November 15, 2009

Storytelling in math




It was a simple idea. Get the students to write a simple story and use math to solve it. The story premise was that an alien has landed in your back yard. It will call the rest of the ships if you do not answer 3 proportion questions. Sounds easy right!

The students created simple stories and added great answers from the homework they had been doing over the past few days. I also showed them how to find cc images. They are not cited properly yet but at least the images are cc.

Here are the links to the rooms so you can read them your self.

873
841
817
816

Here is the original assignment. Enjoy

Sunday, November 08, 2009

Making your own Game

I have always wanted kids to become producers of games instead of being only consumers of games.  My favorite games for kids at school are the ones that are flashed based.

Samorst 1







Samorst 2

or
Machinarium



All of these are brilliant story starters for any Language Arts Class.  But how do kids make their own?? Thanks to a tweet from Alec Couros a few weeks ago they can!




Here is a sample game made by a member using a well known Flickr Image.






Fable Forge is a site where you can make your own flash games like those in Samorst land.  No where near as good but you can make them none the less.  It would be interesting to see how many educational games could be made just using simple pictures and hiding things on the screen!! Give it a try and let me know.  I will be trying this out with some of my students later this year.  Hey it is free and gives kids power to create instead of just playing around.  No wait they will be playing around.  Hmmm a win win situation.