Class-sourcing data generation through games

In my newly restructured first units for ninth and tenth grade math, we tackle sets, functions, and statistics. In the past, teaching these topics have always involved collecting some sort of data relevant to the class – shoe size, birthday, etc. Even though making students part of the data collection has always been part of my plan, it always seems slower and more forced than I want it to be. I think the big (and often incorrect) assumption is that because the data is coming from students, they will find it relevant and enjoyable to collect and analyze.

This summer, I remembered a blog post from Dan Meyer not too long ago describing a brilliantly simple game shared by Nico Rowinsky on Twitter. I had tried this manually with pencil and paper and students since hearing about it. It always required a lot of effort collecting and ordering papers with student guesses, but student enthusiasm for the game usually compelled me to run a couple of rounds before getting tired of it. It screamed for a technology solution.

I spent some time this summer learning some of the features of the Meteor Javascript web framework after a recommendation from Dave Major. It has the real-time update capabilities that make it possible to collect numbers from students and reveal a scoreboard to all users simultaneously. You can see my (imperfect) implementation hosted at http://lownumber.meteor.com, and the code at Github here. Dave was, as always, a patient mentor during the coding process, eagerly sharing his knowledge and code prototypes to help me along.

If you want to start your own game with friends, go to lownumber.meteor.com/config/ and select ‘Start a new game’, then ask people to play. Wherever they are in the world, they will all see the results show up almost instantly when you hit the ‘Show Results’ button on that page. I hosted this locally on my laptop during class so that I could build a database of responses for analysis later by students.

The game was, as expected, a huge hit. The big payoff was the fact that we could quickly play five or six games in my class of twenty-two grade nine students in a matter of minutes and built some perplexity through the question of how one can increase his or her chances of winning. What information would you need to know about the people playing? What tools do we have to look at this data? Here comes statistics, kids.

It also quickly led to a discussion with the class about the use of computers to manage larger sets of data. Only in a school classroom would one calculate measures of central tendency by hand for a set of data that looks like this:

This set also had students immediately recognizing that 5000 was an outlier. We had a fascinating discussion when some students said that out of the set {2,2,3,4,8}, 8 should be considered an outlier. It led us to demand a better definition for outlier than ‘I know it when I see it’. This will come soon enough.

The game was also a fun way to introduce sets with the tenth graders by looking at the characteristics of a single set of responses. Less directly related to the goal of the unit, but a compelling way to get students interacting with each other through numbers. Students that haven’t tended to speak out in the first days of class were on the receiving end of class-wide cheers when they won – an easy channel for low pressure positive attention.

As you might also expect, students quickly figured out how to game the game. Some gave themselves entertaining names. Others figured out that they could enter multiple times, so they did, though still putting in their name each time. Some entered decimals which the program rounded to integers. All of these can be handled by code, but I’m happy with how things worked out as is.

If you want instructions on running this locally for your classroom, let me know. It won’t be too hard to set up.