Math, Gaming, Education, not necessarily in that order

Recently I listened in on a recorded webinar on Classroom 2.0 by Tony Vincent on interactive stories based on the old Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books. Tony is also an expert in technology in the classroom, specifically on hand-held devices. His demonstration on how he incorporated the adventure stories into an English class was very interesting. Students wrote the stories and created elaborate plot lines with alternate endings, this alone caught the interest of many students. However, the class continued to post these stories online using hyperlinks to choose the path of the story instead of flipping through pages like in the old books.

This interactive lesson brought my thinking around to game playing. When students are allowed to make decisions in the class and compete in a game setting, motivation and attention levels skyrocket! I have dabbled in game development for math classrooms, but I have a lot to learn. Giant Battling Robots is a blog that dissects the math intrinsic to many games and discusses both the quality of the game and the mathematics found within. This particular entry does a fantastic job describing Scrabble as a math game more than a word game.

Often I let my natural enthusiasm enhance my lecturing or lesson of the day, just like Robert Ahdoot here:
but game playing is too effective to not put more thought and effort into incorporating into my curriculum.

Anyone have any good ideas about linking High School or Junion High level mathematics to any type of game in a lesson format, please comment or drop me a line, thanks.