Warm-up Games and a Math-in-Music Lesson

Over the past few years, we have interviewed hundreds of teachers, principals, after-school staff and other experts in education – 100% cited maintaining student attention as a challenge. Across the classes we observed and teachers we interviewed, from Title I schools, from 15-50% of students were not turning in their work.

To help catch student attention, either at the beginning of a lesson, or to apply a concept as attention starts to wane, we’re building a series of “Warm-up Games” that can be played on a Chromebook.

Our first five warm-up games all take less than 10 minutes, from beginning to end. These include games in Spanish and English, cross-curricular games with math and music or science and a game to teach history and music vocabulary.

Bake-a-palooza – Dividing unit fractions by integer – PLAY GAME

Bake-a-palooza Español – Spanish version of Bake-a-palooza – PLAY GAME

Minnesota Turtles – Concepts of indigenous and endangered species and converting fractions to decimals. – PLAY GAME

All That Math Jazz – Jazz history and using ratios. – PLAY GAME

All That Jazz Music – Jazz history and music vocabulary – PLAY GAME

Wondering How You’d Use These Games?

Check out one option in the All that Math Jazz lesson by Isabel Bozada-Jones of Ohio. Like Isabel, we’ve often found that students are more interested in math when they can see its application to other subjects.

Our game catalog is growing – and still free

Like us, you’ve probably seen a lot of grant-funded programs disappear once the grant ended. We’re proud to say that, through a combination of public and private funding, we’ve gone from 10 Chromebook games at the end of the Growing Math project to 17 today. You can find the list, math and other content taught and links to play here.

Within the next few months, we’ll have at least two more warm-up games and two longer games released, one of which is bilingual in Spanish and English.

Thanks to the SciTech Minnesota program, we’ve been able to add two software developer interns. Thanks to the Center for Economic Inclusion, we’ve been able to hire a Business Development Specialist, freeing up AnnMaria’s time to focus on software development. What this means for you is that a couple of the games that have been in beta will have their final (fingers-crossed) bug-free release, and every game in our catalog will be receiving an update over the next several months.