Teaching geometry with video games

Geometry and video games 

Nowadays, it is very common to see how many children spend most of their evenings playing video games in their rooms. There are many people who seem to be against this action and prefer to prohibit this behaviour. However, video games can give us more benefits than we can imagine. Indeed, some video games provide us with examples of geometry that can help students to change their perspective about this theme which is most of the time a boring perspective.

For this reason, I want to share with you different types of games that are connected to geometry. So, take advantage of it and instead of prohibiting this habit, encourage your students to play those video games while analysing their geometries characteristics.

Some researchers claim to say that while playing these video games, students will be able to work with rotation and translation movement. Moreover, these games have a great impact on the learning process of students. Many of the examples that I will give later on, approach students with concepts like geometric figures, area, perimeter and prism.

 

Now it is time to see some examples:

 

The first game is the well known “Minecraft”

Minecraft is a game in which players will have to face different adventures, nevertheless what is important is that they can create their own spaces. As we can see, all the heads of the characters have a square shape and even we can see rectangles in some parts of their bodies. 

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfnR235h3us

Is easy to see that all this word is made by geometric figures and it is very important to make students aware of that so they can connect concepts and keep those terms in mind easily.

As I said before, players are able to make their own designs, which means working with geometry figures. Many advantage players have created fabulous creations like this one: 

These creations made students work with geometry in a creative way. It is something very attractive for them so let’s try to get closer to them and ask which kind of things they like so we can motivate them more. In fact, we are working with students that are called “digital native” therefore, the best way in order to ask them to give an answer to a problematic game is by introducing this kind of game. 

This is an example of how to construct these fantastic cities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkrCy1voW00

What many educational researchers have been discovering is that it is necessary to include reality into math lessons in order to make them more attractive. The conclusion has been that video games could be one great answer to this task. As matter of fact, there has also been another topic very popular in these researches which is the union of two elements TAC( knowledge and learning technologies) +GAMES.

This is an interesting speech about games and education: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X1m7tf9cRQ 

The solution to this union is learning mathematics through video games. But is it possible to achieve this? Well, we just have to look at the video game itself because it is created by mathematical mechanisms, for instance, the algorithm, the planes, the perspectives and so on. 

Let’s discover another example: 

This example is an older one, but it is very relevant since all the game has to do with two different geometrical figures: a rectangle and a sphere.

"Brick Breaker"

As you can see, in this game you just have to destroy different rectangles by using a sphere. It is an old game but it is more than interesting to see how by just using two geometric figures you can create a video game. 

Perhaps, you might think that students can not develop any kind of benefit from playing games, but let me tell you that it has been proven that video games help to develop cognitive reasoning like visual acuity and long term attention. 

Finally, I would like to share with you a resource that you can also use in your class and that contains a huge variety of video games to use. Scratch is a free software created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for students from 8 to 16 years old. This software gives you the chance to create any kind of informatics programme in case you would like to use it not only for geometry lessons but for other subjects too. 

Link to the web: https://scratch.mit.edu/

This is an example of a game you can create with this software: 

Explanation: The cat has to achieve the different numbers that are located in the corners of the scream and also avoid the crabs. Once the cat reaches the finish line, it will have to create a polygon

 with the number sides of the final number achieved. 

What are we working on in this activity? Processes, methods and mathematical attitudes. 

References

F. (2016, 17 octubre). La Geometría en los Videojuegos. El rinoceronte matemático. https://elrinocerontematematico.wordpress.com/2016/10/17/la-geometria-en-los-videojuegos/

 

P. (2016, octubre 17). ¿Los videojuegos y la geometría son compatibles? El rinoceronte matemático.  

https://elrinocerontematematico.wordpress.com/2016/10/17/los-videojuegos-y-la-geometria-son-compatibles/

 

            Janeiro, E. (2016). Scratch y videojuegos aplicados a la enseñanza de la geometría. 

https://reunir.unir.net/bitstream/handle/123456789/4273/JANEIRO%20TORRES%2c%20ENMA.pdf?sequence=1