Technology- Cash Cow

So, the other day I played the game cash cow on the iPod touch.  This game revolves around combining coins to equal other coins.  So, three nickels and a dime equals a quarter.

As I was playing this game, I realized the educational benefits of it.  It is helping students combine like terms.  And like terms are going to be important in the later parts of mathematics such as algebra, geometry, etc.

It reminds me of a talk that Clifford Stoll gave where he talks about the Internet and computers and their role in education.  He posited that learning is not suppose to be fought, therefore, computers and games should not be used in education.  He gave the example that when he was in school, film strips were used, and he never paid attention to any of them.  He believes that the film strips were basically a babysitting tool, and like this he believes that computers and technology are used for the same thing.

Like it or not, today's students are different than the students that were in the education system 20 years ago.  We cannot go back 20 years ago because times have changed.  Today's students rely on technology to entertain them.  So why don't we utilize that desire to use technology  as entertainment and use it as a teaching tool.

One of the things that I would like to do as a future EBD special education teacher is to create a computer game that has no rules as well as computer game that has rules.  These two games would be the same game just one of them would have rules and the other would not.  The idea behind why there would be two versions of the game is that the game with no rules would be used on Monday.  It would be an introduction to the lesson for that entire week.  The idea is that just like there are rules in games, there are rules in social situations.  The rest of the week, we would talk about the particular rule or rules that relate to that game.  On that Friday, we would play the version of the game that has rules.

The benefit of this is that it is keeping students interested while teaching them what their supposed to learn.  In EBD, we're supposed to teach them social skills.  By making social skills fun and social rules fun, it is making students want to come because it's fun.  I recognize that I am of a very few minority that believes that education should be fun and not the way of making education fun is by creating a very strong rapport with students.