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Making Mathematics fun: The ‘Fear Room’ game
Christina Misailidou, Ronald Keijzer
To cite this version:
Christina Misailidou, Ronald Keijzer. Making Mathematics fun: The ‘Fear Room’ game. Eleventh
Congress of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education, Utrecht University, Feb
2019, Utrecht, Netherlands. �hal-02423486�
Making Mathematics fun: The ‘Fear Room’ game
Christina Misailidou
1and Ronald Keijzer
21
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Department of Education, Athens, Greece;
C.Misailidou@primedu.uoa.gr
2
iPabo University of Applied Sciences, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; r.keijzer@ipabo.nl Keywords: Mathematics task design, Mathematics curriculum resources, Aids for Mathematics teaching and learning.
Introduction
Despite its importance, mathematics is often perceived as boring and difficult. The demand for exciting mathematical experiences resulted in the Netherlands in a yearly event called the ‘Big Maths Day’ (Abels et al., 2016). During such a day, pupils are not taught their usual curriculum:
instead, they are involved in playful mathematical activities. In this report, we present selected results from a study that involved the design and implementation of a ‘Maths Day’ (‘MD’) in a Greece.
Theoretical Background
The MD activities were designed drawing on ‘Realistic Mathematics Education’ (‘RME’) and
‘Inquiry Based Learning’ (‘IBL’). According to RME, teaching mathematics should be a process of
‘guided reinventing’ (Freudental, 1991). Pupils, guided by their teacher, reinvent and construct mathematics concepts from meaningful situations. Such reinvention can be successful, when it is based on ‘inquiry’. ‘Inquiry based learning’ is an educational approach, which is ‘driven more by a learner’s questions than by a teacher’s lessons’ (p. 1, EDC, 2016). Pupils try to find the answers they are looking for, by working in groups, on meaningful activities guided by their teachers.
Methodology
The Greek MD took place in a primary school located in the capital of Greece, Athens. Different mathematical activities were planned for different classes. This report focuses on the 3rd and 4th
year classes, which consisted of 34 pupils with an age span of 8-10 years. Their day was labelled
‘Amusement Park’ and consisted of three parts: the ‘Introduction’, the ‘Circuit Form’ and the ‘Open Problem’ activities. The pupils were divided in six groups and were guided by four researchers/teachers. Data were collected from observations and interviews. Results from one group of pupils working and on a ‘Circuit Form’ activity called the ‘Fear Room’ will be presented below.
Results
The ‘Fear Room’ activity is essentially a variation of the board game ‘Snakes and Ladders’. A giant board is set up on the floor, made of A4 paper sheets with the numbers 1 to 40 written on them (Figure 1). There are ‘traps’ (the sheets with the plastic snake, bat and spider on them) and
‘bonuses’ (the sheets with small colourful papers on them). Two opponent teams would play the
game each time. One member from each team would be chosen as a ‘pawn’. There was a stack of
cards from which each team had to choose one every time they played. Each card ‘ordered’ the
players to perform a combination of mathematical operations. The players had to choose numbers for the selected operations. The aim of the game was to come up with a result that would lead them to a ‘bonus’ rather than a ‘trap’. The learning objective of this activity was ‘tackling mental calculations with numbers up to 100’.
Figure 1: A team playing in the ‘Fear Room’
Initially, the group that we focus on, encountered difficulties with the calculations. Nevertheless, as the game went on, they got used to the procedure of finding the right operations and the right results. All the pupils emphasised that they liked this game and that the funniest part of it was
‘being a pawn’.
Conclusion
The ‘Fear Room’ activity provoked ‘inquiry based learning’ and on the same time the pupils perceived it as ‘a very funny game’. Such findings indicate that mathematics-despite its ‘bad’
reputation as a difficult and boring subject can become interesting and appealing when it is enriched by ideas from RME and IBL.
Acknowledgments
