Week # 1
Recently, the world has been impacted with a game that has cause various streams of emotions. All I have to say is two words; Flappy Birds. Yes, that is right, Flappy Birds is a game that has cause so much chaos with such a simple concept. The player of the game only has to tap the screen of the phone to control the bird. Sounds simple does it not? Well many people are becoming obsessed with the game of simplicity. However, what people are not realizing is that they are incorporating physics at the same time. Frank Noschese author of the blog Action-Reaction did a study to prove that Flappy Bird has some physics. He showed various physics formulas to show that the bird in the game is equivalent to a real life red robin in weight. However, everything else in the game is not so close to physics but what we find out is that there is some education to this game. The sad thing about finding out if flappy bird is true, if you do not have the game already downloaded on your phone, you will never know because the company removed the game about a 3 weeks ago.
Week #2
The second blog post that Noschase wrote was about dealing with the comparison of Quizzes vs. Projects. Noschase wondered when students take a quiz do they really understand the concepts of the questions? He went on to post videos showing how students used projects to explain topics in class vs. quizzes on which its knowledge that they have studied. He went on to say that he gives his students quizzes so he can see what they have learned from his lessons. He also assign his students projects so in order to give them a creative outlet and to see their viewpoint of the topic. I believe that students need both hands on learning experience and quizzes. In my opinion, hands on learning gives the students a better way of learning things verses sitting in front of a power point and a teacher lecturing. In reality they have had enough of that style of teaching. Allow students to have fun without them realizing that they are learning. However, an exam in any form or fashion will allow the teacher to see if that hands on approach to that subject was successful or not.
Week #3
The blog post I decided to read from Noschase dealt with teachers and their teaching methods. As the years pass us by and technology advances, teaching should change to, right? Well, sad to say, many teachers are very sensitive about the way they teach their students. The thing about it is, and I have to agree, is that the traditional method of teaching is not helping students learn the material. Noschase calls teachers who do not want to stray away from traditional teaching as reluctant. I believe that we must help our students. As a future teacher I will not entirely stray away from traditional teaching but I will make it as fun and interesting as possible.
Week #4
For my most recent read on Noschase’s blog I decided to go back to an old blog post when he was talking about Khan Academy. I found it as an interesting read and I wanted to know Nischase’s opinion dealing with Khan Academy. Overall, Noschase is not really impressed with the website. He views it as a way of teaching students short cuts verses learning and truly understanding the concepts. He feels that Khan Academy does not truly align with the teaching of Physics. He went on to say that KA needs a dashboard to show students how many times they entered a question wrong and common mistakes that students made in the problems. In my opinion, Khan Academy is a fairly resourceful educational tool. It is not going to be perfect overnight. However, in the end it is all about making sure the student learns and understand the concepts.
No comments:
Post a Comment