Middle school students’ employments of gestures for forming three-dimensional objects using an extrusion or spinning method

Game-based learning (GBL) has increasingly been used to promote students’ learning engagement. Although prior GBL studies have highlighted the significance of learning engagement as a mediator of students’ meaningful learning, the existing accounts failed to capture specific evidence of how exactly students’ in-game actions in GBL enhance learning engagement. Hence, this mixed-method study was designed to examine whether middle school students’ in-game actions are likely to promote certain types of learning engagement (i.e., content and cognitive engagement). This study used and examined the game E-Rebuild, a single-player three-dimensional architecture game that requires learners’ application of math knowledge. Using in-depth gameplay behavior analysis, this study sampled a total of 92 screen-recorded and video-captured gameplay sessions attended by 25 middle school students. We adopted two analytic approaches: sequential analysis and thematic analysis. Whereas sequential analysis explored which in-game actions by students were likely to promote each type of learning engagement, the thematic analysis depicted how certain gameplay contexts contributed to students’ enhanced learning engagement. The study found that refugee allocation and material trading actions promoted students’ content engagement, whereas using in-game building tools and learning support boosted their cognitive engagement. This study also found that students’ learning engagement was associated with their development of mathematical thinking in a GBL context.

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3-D Graphing, Contour Graphs, Topographical Maps, and Matrices Using Spreadsheets

Mathematics Teacher ◽

10.5951/mt.92.2.0166 ◽

1999 ◽

Vol 92 (2) ◽

pp. 166-174

Author(s):

Louis Feicht

Keyword(s):

Middle School ◽

Middle School Students ◽

Three Dimensional ◽

First Year ◽

School Students ◽

Mathematical Concepts ◽

Younger Age ◽

Hands On ◽

College Calculus ◽

Topographical Maps

Modern spreadsheets can make powerful mathematical concepts accessible to students at a younger age than ever before. Contours and three–dimensional graphing are topics that were previously reserved until well into the first year of college calculus. Three–dimensional graphing now can be successfully taught to middle school students with the assistance of a computer spreadsheet. This combination of the computer with hands-on activity exposes students to numerical and graphical representations of data on the same spreadsheet “page” and forces them to make connections between the two forms of data.

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Leafing through Irregular Shapes

Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School ◽

10.5951/mathteacmiddscho.21.1.0053 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 21 (1) ◽

pp. 53-60

Author(s):

Alessandra King

Keyword(s):

Middle School ◽

Middle School Students ◽

Surface Area ◽

Three Dimensional ◽

Real Life ◽

Two Dimensional ◽

School Students ◽

Classroom Experience ◽

Irregular Shapes ◽

Area And Volume

By the time middle school students start a prealgebra course, they should have explored a variety of familiar two-dimensional and three-dimensional shapes and should have been exposed to the concepts of perimeter, area, and volume. They know that they can assign numerical values to some attributes of a shape, such as length and surface area. However, my classroom experience confirms the statement that although “students may have developed an initial understanding of area…, many will need additional experiences in measuring directly to deepen their understanding of the area of two-dimensional shapes” (NCTM 2000, p. 242). In addition, the students' previous practice with area is usually with polygons, circles, or a combination of both. However, many real-life objects cannot be described or approximated with simple geometric shapes or with combinations of shapes. Therefore, this activity, which asks students to estimate the area of irregular shapes using finer and finer grids, is not only novel but also a way to apply mathematics to real life.

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