Transmedia design, which involves extending a narrative from one medium to another, offers a context for potentially rich, interdisciplinary learning. We explored these opportunities by creating a week-long workshop to guide 7th-grade student teams in designing games based on comic books about viruses. This design case describes the framework and…

Rich learning tasks embedded within a familiar context allow students to work like mathematicians while making sense of the mathematics. This article demonstrates how 11-12 year-old students were able to employ all of the proficiency strands while demonstrating a deep understanding of some of the "big ideas" of probabilistic thinking.

In the author's experience with this activity, students struggle with the idea of representativeness in probability. Therefore, this student misconception is part of the classroom discussion about the activities in this lesson. Representativeness is related to the (incorrect) idea that outcomes that seem more random are more likely to happen. This…

In grade 6, students should be able to "perform arithmetic operations, including those involving whole-number exponents, in the conventional order when there are no parentheses to specify a particular order" (p. 44). In grades 7 and 8, the rules of order of operations are used to simplify progressively complicated expressions and in…

In 2010 1.1 million pupils took private lessons in Germany, with 25% of all German children by the age of 17 having attended paid private lessons at some point in their school career (Klemm & Klemm, 2010). The high demand for support for learning curricular content led us to consider an integrated solution that speeds up both the design of…

Games can both generate excitement among students and motivate them to participate in mathematics. Although games have been used primarily to "review" mathematical concepts at the middle school level, games should, and often do, have other instructional purposes. When teachers use mathematical games as an instructional strategy, they are…

Digital games offer an appealing environment for assessing student proficiencies, including skills and misconceptions in a diagnostic setting. This paper proposes a dynamic Bayesian network modeling approach for observations of student performance from an educational video game. A Bayesian approach to model construction, calibration, and use in…

Teens are impatient and unsophisticated online researchers who are often limited by their poor reading skills. Because they are attracted to clean and simple Web interfaces, they often turn to Google--and now Wikipedia--to help meet their research needs. The Google Game, co-authored by this author, teaches kids that there is a well-thought-out…

Describes the probability and statistics component of an experimental mathematical science and communications program. Some of the successes and failures are considered. (PK)