Monday 31 August 2015

Math Duel League

In 2014, Lee Parkinson wrote an iBook to share ideas for iPad device use during the Football World Cup. This blog post builds upon one of Lee's ideas in that book. Incidentally, all of Lee's books are very useful (for both Apple and Android devices) and can be found both here and here

 Image credit: Lee Parkinson

In the book '15 iPad Lessons for the World Cup' Lee outlined an idea for using the Math Duel app in class to improve maths skills through a bit of healthy competition. This year, I plan to build upon this with the Math Duel League...

This is an idea I've been playing around with for a while and hope will work. I imagine it'll take a bit of tinkering with, and as I do, I'll update this post. As I'm writing the post before trying it out, any suggestions others have are most welcome.

We're in school for thirty odd weeks during the year and I have thirty children in my class. This is where the idea started. How about each child playing another child each week through the year and then, at the end of the year, have a completed league table. 

- Each child must play each other child 'home' and 'away' during the year. A copy of the class list for each child to tick off as they go will be useful for this.

- 'Home' is the child sat in their usual class seat. The 'away' child moves to sit with them. The child at 'home' inputs the settings (there needs to be a fair play agreement here). They then play their game.

- On Google Drive, there'll be a spreadsheet for children to input results into and the table can be created from this. The children will be able to access the Google Drive document from the iPad device once their game has finished. 

My main concern using thinking about this has been about the children who may finish bottom of the league. I'll not share the whole league table with the class. The 'home' and 'away' and the 'home child' being in charge of the settings should enable all children to win some games. Another thought was about handicaps based upon head starts or giving children certain times tables to work on. 

Image Credit: Ellie's Games


I'll give it a go and see how it goes...

No comments:

Post a Comment