Gentle Revolution Homeschooling (Archive): The Game in Algebra

Sunday, December 30, 2012

The Game in Algebra

Just one of the recent equations Hunter solved, thanks to Dragon Box.

Somehow in a span of two days with just a few gaming sessions, Hunter went from dragging pictures of whimsical dragons around on a screen to solving some pretty serious algebra equations.

Now that he's beat the game we're just trying to figure out where to go next. I never knew algebra was so much fun, but as Jordan Shapiro said on his Forbes.com review of the game, "[the creator] didn’t gamify algebra. Instead, he found algebra’s intrinsic game and brought it to life." Precisely.

"Let all things be done decently and in order." 1 Corinthians 14:40

Hunter is 7 years, 9 months old

Dragon Box isn't a free app, but it's genius and practical magic is probably the best $6 I have spent on my kid in a long time. You can find it at the app store for iPod, iPad, and mac.

Also available in the Google Play store.

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Gentle Revolution 101

Your Answer Defines You
"What can we do with thirty seconds? What can we not do with thirty seconds!... [Suppose] your little child looks out the window and sees a collie. 'What's that?' he asks you. You have five options, which will each take about thirty seconds to make stick:

1. We can tell him, "Look, baby, Mommy has to get dinner."
2. We can tell him, "That's a bow-wow."
3. We can tell him, "That's a dog."
4. We can tell him, "That's a dog called a collie."

The fifth option is to tell him that it is a dog called a collie and then go on to tell him thirty second's worth of information about that animal...

How sad it is that we put information into a computer with great skill and great precision and put information into our children's brains in a hit-or-miss, slip-shod, and often untruthful way."

-Glenn Doman