Exit Slip #1

One of the key questions that came up in our breakout group was how teachers can show students that what they are learning is both useful and important. We recognized that while real-life applications help, it is often even more meaningful to connect the material to students’ personal interests or hobbies. Here, I was reminded of the manga Science Fell in Love, So I Tried to Prove It, where a student who loved playing dating-sims became motivated after his professor connected computer science research to finding the optimal path in said dating sim. While it might sound trivial, if a game has 10 scenes with 3 choses each, there would have to be 3^10 ≈ 60000 different ways to play it which would be difficult even for a computer to find the 1 right path. This made me think about the power of motivation and how I, as a teacher, can design lesson plans that tap into the interests or hobbies of students while still meeting curricular goals. In physics, I could connect sports such as basketball to projectile motion, but making such connections for math seems a bit trickier...



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