[IAEP] Keith Devlin's open online Q&A on math games: Monday at 8pm ET

[Maria Droujkova]

 Mathematics Education for a New Era: Video Games as a Medium for
LearningJoin Keith Devlin in a question and answer session about his
math game
projects and the new book.

*How to join*

   - Follow this link at the time of the event: *
   http://tinyurl.com/math20event<https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?password=M.FCAF787B38E30D58F943EB7232EE27>
   *
   - Monday, April 11th 2011 we will meet in the LearnCentral online room at
   5:00pm Pacific, 8:00pm Eastern time. WorldClock for your time
zone.<http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=4&day=11&year=2011&hour=20&min=0&sec=0&p1=207>
   - Click "OK" and "Accept" several times as your browser installs the
   software. When you see Elluminate Session Log-In, enter your name and click
   the "Login" button
   - If this is your first time, come a few minutes earlier to check out the
   technology. The room opens half an hour before the event.


All events in the Math 2.0 weekly series:
http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/events
 About the book
[image: MathematicsEducationForANewEra.jpg]
Stanford mathematician and NPR Math Guy Keith Devlin explains why, fun
aside, video games are the ideal medium to teach middle-school math. Aimed
primarily at teachers and education researchers, but also of interest to
game developers who want to produce videogames for mathematics
education, *Mathematics
Education for a New Era: Video Games as a Medium for Learning* describes
exactly what is involved in designing and producing successful math
educational videogames that foster the innovative mathematical thinking
skills necessary for success in a global economy.

Keith writes in his March 2011 MAA
column<http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_03_11.html>
:
One problem with the majority of math ed video games on the market today
that will quickly strike anyone who takes a look, is that they are little
more than a forced marriage of video game technology and traditional
mathematics pedagogy. In particular, the player of such a game generally
encounters the math in symbolic form, often by way of a transparent screen
overlay on top of the gameworld.
But video-game worlds are not paper-and-pencil symbolic representations;
they are imaginary *worlds*. They are meant to be lived in and experienced.
Putting symbolic expressions in a math ed game environment is to confuse
mathematical thinking with its static, symbolic representation on a sheet of
paper. It's like the early would-be aviators who tried to fly by building *
ornithopters* - machines that added flapping wings to four-wheeled cycles.
Those pioneers confused flying with the only instances of flying which they
had observed - birds and insects. Humans achieved flying only when they went
back to basics and analyzed the notion of flying separately from the one
particular implementation they were familiar with. Similarly, to build truly
successful math ed video games, we have to separate the activity of
*doing*mathematics, which is a form of thinking, from its familiar
representation
in terms of symbolic expressions.

Event Host [image: KeithDevlin.jpg]Dr. *Keith Devlin* is a co-founder and
Executive Director of the university's H-STAR
<http://hstar.stanford.edu/>institute, a co-founder of the Stanford
Media
X <http://mediax.stanford.edu/> research network, and a Senior Researcher at
CSLI <http://www-csli.stanford.edu/>. He is a World Economic Forum Fellow
and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His
current research is focused on the use of different media to teach and
communicate mathematics to diverse audiences. He also works on the design of
information/reasoning systems for intelligence analysis. Other research
interests include: theory of information, models of reasoning, applications
of mathematical techniques in the study of communication, and mathematical
cognition. He has written 30 books and over 80 published research articles.
Recipient of the Pythagoras Prize, the Peano Prize, the Carl Sagan Award,
and the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics Communications Award. In 2003, he
was recognized by the California State Assembly for his "innovative work and
longtime service in the field of mathematics and its relation to logic and
linguistics." He is "the Math Guy" on National Public Radio.
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