Paperli.link on Teaching Strategies on Gamification for this week

http://paper.li/SPVasumathy/1378443024?edition_id=8b0f4d00-4831-11e3-8b99-0025907212f4&utm_campaign=paper_sub&utm_medium=email&utm_source=subscription

1.Deep dive: How to Master Creating Games for social Good and Real-World Impact.

2.Badgeville Blog . The Business of Gamification

3. TED Talk byJane McGonigal: The game that can give you 10 extra years of life

and So on ....

Mathematics Exhibition - Wonderful Experience

Mathematics Exhibition October 2013:

This time for our School Annual Exhibition the theme for the Mathematics Exhibition was "puzzles and games".  We experienced maximum crowd.  Parents and guest waited to explore all the games and win it.  The players who reached a certain higher level of the game was incentivized with chocolates.  The first photo is a number puzzle (probability game) called the wheel of chance designed by the students with the help of the carpenter.  Students used water colors to make it attractive. The Tower of Hanoi was made by the carpenter and painted by the students themselves. The Tower of Hanoi on the second photo was a very captivating game because the player had to move the discs from the first peg to the third peg within minimum number of moves following the condition that larger disc cannot be placed on smaller one and only one disc can be moved at a time.  The players could complete a game but found it difficult to do it within minimum number of moves. Many of them were successful with 4 discs.  A student of ninth standard stood for atleast 2 hours playing the game.  She succeeded in moving 5 discs with the minimum moves, but with 6 discs (63 moves) she struggled for one hour and at last won.  The formula for minimum number of moves is 2 raised to the power n (number of discs) minus 1. The frog jump was also interesting some what similar to the Tower of Hanoi with a difference that the frog is not allowed to move backwards.  The frogs was made by the students using clay with the help of the pottery teacher.  All these games are available online.  Go ahead and experience it online. There were few more number puzzles in the exhibition. Sudoku is also another famous logic puzzle found in newspapers.  This grid puzzle provide a strong intrinsic motivation. Sudoku puzzles are available as mobile apps.

 Why should students play these games and puzzles?
What will happen if we allow children to play in the classroom? I still remember playing the game of monopoly during my summer vacations with my family and friends.  We used to play sitting for hours before we were called for having lunch.  The board games were engaging and of educational value. I feel when children sit together to play a board game individuals come together, learn lessons and collaborate. Playing games certainly have academic benefits.
Puzzles develop hand and eye coordination and motivate the child to win the game.  We need to choose proper games which will help them in problem solving skills.  In these holidays I allowed my students to play online games through virtual classes which they enjoyed.  The students enjoyed not only playing games but made wonderful presentation on the concepts they experienced through games which I showed through a projector in the exhibition. Playing games develop positive attitudes and I have found that students show dramatic change in their attitude towards learning Maths. Nowadays students have developed passion learning using technology.  Let us encourage usage of technology in classroom and allow students to learn the way they are interested without delay.

Follow the link to see my presentation on Gamification where I have included more photos of Exhibition and presentation on the visit of Momath Museum at New York by my School students.
https://drive.google.com/a/st.niituniversity.in/file/d/0BwTmtGKgu8slVGRoUVBzMDN1WjA/edit?usp=sharing

Assessing 21st Century Skills

I have developed this animation video for the IRC 2 presentation. Watch and enjoy!

PowToon - Online business presentation software to create free, cool, animated, powerpoint video alternatives

Let us be a partner of this Marathon........

                   New experience of writing exam in word file, checking its originality through a plagiarism checking tool, converting it into pdf version and uploading it on the moodle in a given time frame was entirely a different experience altogether. It was 10th October 2013 when I had to write my second mid-semester exam for 'Introduction to Experiential Learning & reflection and Education' paper of M. Tech. (Ed. Tech.). Before this experience, I had always been appearing for pen-paper test. But this time it has been a feeling of living in real time with 21st century natives.

                  Is the perspective of education in India changing? I think yes. It is not the only evidence of the beginning of new era of spreading knowledge in such a way in 21st century. Pioneers in education have already set numerous benchmarks in this direction. Educating through a blend of different tools and techniques and developing an unique examination system to assess the learning is the hallmark of leading educational Institutes in India and NIIT University is the foreman of all.         

                 We can also be the local change agents. I mean, we should begin with ourselves first and then spread the new knowledge and experience with others and motivate the learning environment. Use of technology, as a vehicle, to bridge the gap between content and pedagogy is in the midway of its development in this century. Let us be a partner of this Marathon, update yourself, walk with the walk and enjoy learning through new styles....   

paper.li link for this week

http://paper.li/LearngEngineers/1379295860

The Pale Blue Dot

“Pale Blue Dot” is a famous photograph of planet Earth. It was taken by Spaceship Voyager 1 from a distance of 6.4 billion km from Earth.

This is an excerpt from a speech by Astronomer and Astro Biologist Carl Sagan, which I find very humbling and would like to share with you all:

Seen from about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles), Earth appears as a tiny dot (the blueish-white speck approximately halfway down the brown band to the right) within the darkness of deep space

We succeeded in taking that picture (from deep space).And, if you look at it you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you’ve ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

It is up to us. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

—Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space