Experiences

Mathematics for game

Anna Luise

Italy

Vocational School

Maths

Teaching in class

Direct

Our School is also attended by a certain number of students with difficulties in learning, concentration, decoding messages or orders and, sometimes also difficulties in orientation (left/right). When in the second school year the Cartesian Plan is introduced to the mentioned above students, they have a lot of difficulties because the mechanical procedures they learnt are not working anymore.
This kind of problem has convinced me to try a game with my students. It should be different from the usual warships game. It should be more targeted and also more involving than the classic frontal lesson, however, it should help the students with Specific Learning Disorders in doing the correct movements to orientate in the Cartesian Plan.
In correspondence with some points I put some letters to be linked together so that students could get a word concerning Maths: to be able to find each letter, students had a clue described in the most natural language (equal coordinates but with opposite sign, a point on an axis with a positive or negative coordinate, a second coordinate corresponding to the biggest absolute value used for the exercise and so on....)
As always a game can be so involving that, as it happened in our situation, also best students, who should be the tutors, wanted to take part to the game.
To go on playing I gave to our students with Specific Learning Disorders the words with the usual scheme, who, clue after clue, composed the missing word. All the other students had the words in scrambled order so that, after interpreting all the given clues, they had a scrambled sequence to anagrammatize in order to discover the correct word. The difficulty in anagrammatizing very often forced the students to discuss about the clues and they looked for the possible mistake so that, unconsciously they reasoned about the mathematical meaning of the used words.
After some exercises like this one almost the whole class executed the final test about the Cartesian Plan successfully and the students with Specific Learning Disorders learnt to orientate among the little squares without getting confused.