Monday, June 28, 2010

Adventures in Pedagogy: Motivation

I'm not exactly sure what to make of it, but my children's motivation towards learning can be modeled by y = k/x where y = motivation and x = age. We've got Aidan (5)...
And Nevan (8)...




...who was dialed-in to this really simple applet I built for Dawson (11).




That's not to say Dawson has no motivation, but it's clear that he's been affected by the point- gathering-culture that is school.

Nevan spent a lot of time simply investigating integer addition and it isn't even on his radar right now as far as planned curriculum goes. He played with (+)+(+) and moved on his own to (-)+(-).

During lunch he asked, "Dad, can you teach me to add a positive plus a negative?"

Guess what my answer was. Go ahead, guess.

I built a couple of assessments in ExamView for them and Dawson was all jacked at his instant-feedback-Dad-I-got-em-all-right performance.

Now they're asking for assessments.

We're not paying them, either. With points or anything.

2 comments:

untilnextstop said...

Once your kids understand basic integer ops, here is a fun link for your kids to try, if you have multiple computers at home. It's a multi-player computer game on simple arithmetic topics! http://arcademicskillbuilders.com/

It's pretty fun, if you're playing against other real people (ie. not the computer).

David Cox said...

Thanks for the link.