School Spirit

While technically today was a half day stop work action for our region of Victoria, I declined to take part and remained at work. Various reasons for the decision, but that’s secondary. Today (well, technically yesterday, but timezones are a funny thing, eh?) was this year’s World Maths Day, and we managed to wrangle an hour and a half in the computer room (which is really the library, but it doubles as a computer lab). We had about forty five kids in there ranging from grades two to four and gave them the opportunity to get online and compete in this world maths challenge.

Fortunately the computers and the internet all worked for us, and only occasionally did kids get booted off the server. It was always easy for them to log back into the site again though. The only slight distraction was that I had to wander back across to enter the password to get them back on the internet.

I must say, the event was fantastic. It’s such a simple little arrangement on the surface… such a simple little idea… and it works great! The kids have their own little passwords and user names, can set up their own avatar for themselves, and then each contest randomly groups them with one to three other players from across the world. It even lets you see their name, their school and their country of origin! The kids were intrigued to find they were competing against people from America, from Japan, a few from various other locations, as well as other kids from Australia. Each round took sixty seconds once it all loaded, and they answered as many addition, subtraction or multiplication questions as they could. Meanwhile, their score and the score of their opponents was rising in real time so they could see if they were behind, ahead, or in a tooth and nail battle for victory.

They absolutely lapped it up!

There were about 16 000 kids online competing when we were working there, and the kids loved watching the ‘questions answered correctly’ tally continually climb and climb. It passed the 142 million mark while we were there. It was at about 165 million at the time of writing this, with just over three and a half hours to go. Many of the kids were eager to take their passwords and usernames home and nag mum and dad for some time on the internet once they got home. Great use for homework, eh?

Anyway, it’s an absolutely fantastic worldwide event, and it’s just a pity we found out about it so late. It would be great to get the kids onto the site a few weeks earlier, set up their little avatars ahead of time, and have a few weeks to build up to it. Next year, eh? I’ll let the kids know.

Just quietly, they won’t be the only ones waiting eagerly…

Seems that tomorrow, March 5th, is World Maths Day. All across the globe, school aged children have signed themselves up (or been signed up like my grade - they just don’t know yet!) to compete against each other for a single World day. As long as it is March 5th somewhere in the world, then the online contest will continue. We only found out about it today ourselves, but I reckon it’s a top little idea to really get kids interested in active maths.

Mind you… lots of people already seem to have heard about it. Our Great Southern Land spoke about it last week before I stumbled into her blog, and it seems it’s an annual thing too. Not sure why, but the ICT teacher only heard about it today and fortunately I was on hand to pick up my kids from their computer session to have her talk to me about it. I got her to sign my grade up and they’re going to find out about it tomorrow.

Yep, tomorrow’s March 5th and World Maths Day will have already started, but better late than never, eh? We’ll be able to spend some more time on Thursday as well, as it will still be running until that International Dateline reaches midnight at about 10pm that night. Even better, that’s the day of the rolling half-day teacher strike in our region. As I’m not walking off (for several reasons), our grade will be operating as usual. As the computer teacher won’t be there until lunchtime, our entire maths hour and a half we could probably sit in the computer rooms competing. Turned out okay so far, provided nothing untoward turns up on Thursday.

Might even see if we can sneak in before recess as well… get the most out of it.

To be honest, I’m a little disappointed it’s only running for a single day. I can really see a usefulness for something of this kind running non stop. Maybe not as a competition, but as a website kids from across the globe can simply log in to and match their maths skills against other kids of their own ability levels.

Imagine that! Kids wanting to do their maths homework, and at the same time, their parents happy to let their kids sit in front of a computer!

At least, that’s my view on the possibilities.

Cheers.