Synthesis Essay

At the start of this episode, we join our Graduate Padawan, Amykin, who is a little bit AT-Ore and a little bit Wookie the Chew, at the end of a journey…or so she thought. She had just finished her Mathematics for Teaching (M4T) Masters program at the University of Calgary, and she felt, like AT-Ore, that she wasn’t quite where she was supposed to be, as if the journey for her wasn’t quite done. She could see her fellow cohort members striding off confidently as if they knew the way forward, but she saw a gap between where she was and where she wanted to be.

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All Artwork is used with permission from James Hance

Star Wars Printing by Flaming Text

Why the Work of Jame Hance?

When I started the MAET program I was challenged to create a mash-up in the form of a video on a topic of my choosing. I thought it was fitting to end my program with a mash-up as well.

James Hance's work is a mash-up of two of my favourite things: Winnie the Pooh based on the work of A.A. Milne and Star Wars based on the work of George Lucas, Lucas Arts, and more recently Disney.

Both the stories of Winnie the Pooh and Star Wars make up core elements of who I am; so that when I saw James's artwork I could see the story of my life playing out in his pictures. Taking some time to reorder the images gave me a story line for my synthesis essay.

I would like to thank James for allowing me use of his pictures to illustrate my journey in the MAET program. His work allowed me to creatively showcase what this journey has meant to me.

May the Force be with You, and with Wookiee the Chew

She still felt that she needed to grow her skills in using Educational Technology so that she could help others to see the benefits of using games and technology in a mathematics classroom. While she had seen the benefits in her own classroom for many years, she did not always have the theories at her fingertips that would help her to explain why games and educational technology were important.

She felt she had much yet to learn and set out on an adventure across the galaxy, or in this case the continent, to digitally attend Michigan State University and learn from the Educational Technology Masters there in the Masters of Arts in Educational Technology (MAET) program.

In the MAET program, Amykin mastered many new forms of technology and applications armed with her trusted companion Droidlet. She learned to wield the power of Twitter, IMovie, Aurasma, Squishy Circuits, Creative Commons, Google Drives, Sites, and Groups, Wordpress, Wix, Podcasts, Paraphrase, Videoscribe, and Wikispaces. She also improved her skills using Windows Live Movie Maker and Audacity. She was able to gain skills in combining tools and applications together to use the strengths in each item to support the

weaknesses in others.

The foray into new technology was not without peril. As with any new technology, the evils of bugs and glitches seemed to abound. Our Grad Padawan was faced with RAM failing and hard drives crashing in her trusted companion Droidlet.

She also faced peril using new programs with little support or instructions, and when some of those new programs used by the instructors were still not stable enough to render a project completely.

It was in those times of peril, that Amykin’s creativity was tested and grew by leaps and bounds. She looked at how technology could be used in tandem to work around an issue, or how an alternative way of presenting an assignment could accomplish what was desired.

While all quests provided the Grad Padawan Amykin with new skills, understandings, and challenges; some quests needed to be classed Epic due to how much they caused the Grad Padawan to grow in both skills and understandings. The first of these Epic Quests was CEP 811: Adapting Innovative Technology to Education. This quest pushed the boundaries of what our Grad Padawan considered technology. Before this quest, she defined technology as things done on computers and tablets, but this quest caused that definition to grow to include anything that could be created using a technological component.

In this quest, she combined a game board, hundreds of lights, the conduction power of salt, and the insulation power of sugar to create an activity that could be used to provide formative assessment of students understanding of points on a Cartesian plane. In the past Amykin, would find a tiny idea from reading about other activities that other teachers had created and then she tweaked them to fit her classroom and her Program of Studies. This was the first time that our Grad Padawan pushed herself to start with nothing but pieces and build something that was able to be used in her classroom. This feeling of being able to repurpose items to create better ways to learn, is a feeling that Amykin carries with her and that motivates her to see new and inventive ways to use what is to build what could be.

The next Epic quest in our Grad Padawan’s program was CEP 800: Learning in Schools and Other Settings, her fourth in the program. In order to complete this quest, Amykin was charged with completing two very different tasks. The first task required her to record her first Podcast. This task had three roadblocks that our Grad Padawan had to navigate before the completion of the task was possible. The first was obtaining a new piece of technology called a cardioid microphone. Upon entering the marketplace looking for a Cardioid dealer, Amykin was met with blank looks of confusion. She thought to herself, "is my translator not working?" She ended up having to locate the brand names recommended by her MAET Masters for this course to gain any comprehension from the marketplace staff.

After a couple of hours of frustration and a successful attempt to stay on the light side, Amykin left the marketplace with the new tech necessary to be added to her set of skills for her task. With that obstacle fully mastered, our Grad Padawan was yet faced with another. She had to navigate the necessity of getting parental permission to record the Podcast with two students, due to the Law of the Galaxy called the Freedom of Information and Privacy Act (FOIP) that protects the privacy of minors very stringently. Once that was obtained, Amykin finished the Podcast, thinking the trouble was behind her…but she would be wrong. Her final challenge came in the post-production of this Podcast. Upon playback, our Grad Padawan noticed that the volume levels of the two student portions of the podcast as well as her own did not match. Amykin was forced to use her skills with the recording program Audacity to try and match the volume levels of the three parts. In the end, it was not possible to get an exact match, but the Podcast as a whole showcased Amykin’s knowledge of the four grounding metaphors of mathematics as per the work of Lakoff and Nunez (2000).

The second challenge of this quest is the part that made this quest turn from a regular quest to an Epic one. In this part of the quest, Amykin was charged with creating a lesson that taught students something that they had trouble learning using technology. Our Grad Padawan had to think, and think and think again but nothing seemed to happen. Then one night, while waiting for her turn to play the Wii version of Mario and Sonic at the Winter Games, the thought just came to her that this game was what she could use.

The game used decimals to the thousandths place to list its times, and sports statistics are calculated using Central Tendency. Thus with Decimal Operations and Central Tendency being two of the sections contained within the Grade 7 Alberta Program of Studies for Mathematics this was a great integration of technology with mathematics. The Grad Padawan found it difficult to balance the need to write a plan for other teachers to follow with the need for the mathematics to occur organically through game play. In the end, Amykin decided to list the order of activities in her plan and then indicate which items to look for to hook the students with the mathematics as it occurred during game play. Using her previous knowledge from her quest CEP 811, our Grad Padawan realized that not all students would be able to access the game without adaptations. To this end, Amykin made a list of ways that the gameplay could be adapted to help support those students with exceptional needs.

For just because an item or activity could be used by a student does not mean that it is the right fit to help that student to be successful. This unit has been so successful it was accepted as a conference session to help teach other teachers with this unit. As well, our Grad Padawan has been approached by many other teachers to procure the lesson plan to allow them to use it with their students as well.

The next quest had our Grad Padawan venturing into a non-education faculty to accept quests in Serious Game Design. The next two quests combined into a single quest, although Amykin did not know it at the start. TC831: Theories Interaction Design and TC 830: Foundations of Serious Games created a two-quest arc in which our Grad Padawan finally found the understanding of game design that she had been looking for at the start of this adventure. She learned to balance the fun aspects of the games that students loved, with the mechanics that allow the game to be a vehicle for learning.

In the second part of this two-quest arc saw our Grad Padawan combining her learning about Mathematical Habits of Mind (Cuoco, Goldenberg, & Mark, 1996) and game design to create a board game to help students in middle school / junior high to change their belief system about what they think is possible for them to achieve in mathematics. This quest also had Amykin increase the size of her support network to have friends and family help her during her playtesting of her game. This playtesting group helped our Grad Padawan unstick her mind from her original plan to iterate the game to improve the playability and player buy-in.

She learned to harness the power of her classmates through Google Groups to use their feedback to iterate her work in order to increase the quality. They also improved her understanding of concepts, theories, and readings in the back and forth debate that occurred amongst the class in reference to the class learning. They were also a great sounding board to talk about ideas whenever our Grad Padawan felt stuck.

The Grad Padawan is looking forward to creating enough copies of the game to be able to play it with a whole class of students at the start of the school year, and then use it as a way to create conversations with students about ways to be more successful in mathematics.

The next quest was not Epic due to a useful final project, even though it was, but due to the struggle the Grad Padawan endured to integrate the knowledge in this course with her pre-existing frame of reference. For the first time in two Masters programs, our Grad Padawan was faced with learning that, at the start, seemed irrelevant to her career path. MI 841: Understanding Users was focused on designing for a single user, a much different point of view than that of a teacher in a public school that caters to all learners in a single classroom.

It felt like the course was sucking her down into the Sarlacc pit, of which there was little hope of escape. However, after talking to the Master of the course, Amykin was able to see the quest knowledge in a new light. She was able, through colleague feedback and a focus group, to come up with a possibility of what a gradebook that supported her school division’s new report card and outlook on assessment could look like. Our Grad Padawan and her colleagues wished that they were able to computer program as well as teach so that they could have this gradebook available to use in the near future.

The last quest to be of the Epic variety is CEP 807: Capstone Educational Technology. In this quest, our Grad Padawan was tasked with creating a holo-recording of all the important parts of her MAET journey. During the course of this quest, Amykin had to reflect on what was important in this journey and how this journey had changed who she was as a teacher and as a learner. It also gave her the opportunity to realize that she had come a lot further on the path from Padawan to Master than she had previously believed to be true. She now has a method of showing that learning to others, as well as a way to display her present skills and abilities.

The end of this Episode MAET: a New Hope for the Grad Padawan is bittersweet. While she is excited to start the next episode in her journey, the idea of being the Master of her own learning is a daunting one. She no longer has a sage advisor willing to help her to stay on the correct path, but must navigate the perils that are before her alone. That is alone, except for her trusty companion Droidlet, who unless he needs to be retired to a Jawa trash barge, is ready and waiting for the next episode of the adventure to begin.

Cuoco, A., Goldenberg, E., & Mark, J. (1996). Habits of Mind: Organizing Principles for Mathematics Curricula. Journal of Mathematical Behaviour, 15, 375-402.

Hance, J. (2010). Wookiee the Chew The House At Chew Corner. James Hance.

Lakoff, G., & Núñez, R. (2000). Where Mathematics Comes From How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being. New York: Basic Books.

Lucas, G. (Director). (1977). Star Wars [Motion Picture].

Milne, A. A. (1926). Winnie the Pooh. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd.

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