How Math can be fun

It was down to the wire for Team Smash Brothers and Lightning Kill.

It was down to the wire for Team Smash Brothers and Lightning Kill. Their robots had survived shoves and claws to emerge as finalists over 22 others in a competition in Pomona,California,last week. Now,the championship was at stake.

The teams of fifth- and sixth-graders shook hands. Then,action! The bots,assembled with Lego parts and propelled by a computer chip the students had programmed,wheeled forward on a tabletop ring. They whirred and spun. Lightning Kill landed the first blow,knocking Smash Brothers on its side. Smash pushed back. Then Lightning Kill spun around and propelled itself out of the ring.

Victory for Smash Brothers! The crowd roared. The winning boys jumped up,eyes wide,mouths agape,fists pumping in the air.

Can math be this much fun? Christian Avila,the 10-year-old son of Mexican immigrant restaurant workers,never would have thought so. Math,he said,was a little bit boring with work sheets of division and multiplication.

Until last year,that is,when California State Polytechnic University,Pomona educators brought the robot programme to his school,Montvue Elementary in Pomona,30 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. The programme was conceived as an effort to excite kids about math by making it less abstract and more connected to real-life problem-solvingsuch as how to program robots to knock one another out of the ring.

Now weve found something we really like: robots,” said Christian’s grinning teammate and programming maestro,Juan Perez,an 11-year-old Mexico native whose father works in construction and whose mother is a school aide.

Cesar Larriva,a Cal Poly Pomona associate professor and math education specialist,has been frustrated with the way math is taught in schoolsin particular,the focus on computation and manipulation of symbols disconnected,he said,from real-life experiences. When we put students in a classroom,we isolate them from authentic practices, he said. People in the real world dont do book reports or fill out work sheets.

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But robots,he thought,offered a different experience. So he found two classrooms,one at Montvue and the other at Collegewood Elementary in nearby Walnut. He selected teachers to introduce the programme. He nailed down a $140,000 grant to run the programme for three years.

Students built the robots. Then they programmed their machines on a laptop. Larriva and his Cal Poly Pomona colleagues took care not to tell the students how to do it,but encouraged them to figure it out on their own,aiming to foster scientific inquiry,critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

To program a robot to move a foot forward,Juan explained,he had to figure out through trial and error how many wheel rotations it took to advance that distance. Then he had to figure out how many rotations it would take to move it 3.5 feet. The students learned measurement,fractions,decimals,proportional reasoning.

Mary Lou Ortiz-Jamieson,the teacher of the winning Montvue team,said she cant keep her students away from the robots. Cal Poly Pomona is seeking funds to expand the programme. The educators say it is too soon to know whether it will help improve test scores,but it seems to have inspired the students to see math in a more relevant light.