When you walk into Michael Waugh’s classroom in the FDR middle school, you get to see what the new approach to teaching math looks like. Geometry, computational thinking and video-games blend together into a unique learning experience. As Grade 8 students break into their first geometry unit of the year, Mr. Waugh uses the vintage video game ‘PacMan’ to help teach this challenging topic.
Describing a how Mr. PacMan moves through the maze is surprisingly difficult. When tasked with describing his movement for the first time, most students just repond ‘left, right, up, down’ or ‘north, south, east, west’. But the truth is that the movement is much more complex. Mr. PacMan slides, turns and even flips; highlighting important euclidian geometrical concepts like transposition, reflection and rotation. As kids begin to see this how these geometrical concepts play-out in the video game; their own understanding of how geometry works in the classroom begins to take shape. Their answers begin to develop depth and nuance as their understanding grows.
When I was a kid, this real-world, hands-on approach would have been greatly appreciated. For me; it was straight to shapes, a ruler, graph paper and formulas. The contextualization and hands-on practice highlighted in the PacMan lessons was skipped. So was my chance to use computational thinking to help wrap my mind around this new concept at my own pace. And you can probably guess how I felt about geometry when I was 13 years old.
While the principles of Euclid haven’t changed in some 2400 years, the approach of how these key ideas should be taught definitely has! By forming connections to the real-world, and letting kids go through the steps to naturally cement their own understandings, this new math class feels very different than the ones of old!
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