Ishani Thakur
March 3rd, 2016
Jun Ru/Ishani Organization
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Jun Ru and I have been working for three weeks now on our games. When we initially started to construct a vision for our games, I went through the motions I had been through before when teaching other kids math. I thought that we could teach kids how to approach math in a more physical manner, meaning instead of just memorizing how to solve a particular problem, they would be able to assess a given problem and use their skills to solve it. But Jun Ru, having tutored Joahan, an underprivileged kid, in math before, helped me realize that this was an unreasonable goal because the kids have little to no foundation for learning math. It’s not their fault or the teacher’s fault, it’s just that there are too many kids for teacher to teach effectively. So we started at the beginning and tried to analyze what kids really needed, basic fraction multiplication and division. We also wanted to help kids get a physical sense for what they were doing when they were multiplying and dividing fractions. I focused on fraction division and designed a game where kids were initially asked a whole number divided by a fraction. To solve the problem, the kids were asked to see how many of the fraction fit into the whole number. They did this visually by drawing and dividing rectangles into the fraction and counting how many pieces there were. Then the game asked kids to solve problems concerning the division of two fractions. Simple problems such as 1/2 / 1/8 were done in the same visual manner as the earlier problems, however when it came to fractions that were harder to draw, the game showed the kids that dividing fractions were equivalent to multiplying by the reciprocal. This was stated as a fact initially, but the game showed the kids the past problems they had solved visually, providing a physical sense as to why dividing a fraction is equivalent to multiplying by its reciprocal. When creating this game, I realized how privileged I am to go the Menlo School. Thanks to the teachers at Menlo I am able to look at a math problem with a physical sense, when these kids are struggling with simple fraction multiplication and division. I will be forever grateful for this, and in turn want to help other kids understand math and how to use it to their advantage.
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