Transcriber: Isabella Piras Reviewer: Capa Girl
My first day as a high school math teacher,
here in the US, was a day I'll never forget.
Armed with 6 weeks of training and a little prior teaching experience,
at an all-girls prep school in rural England.
I believed I was ready, ready to change the world,
ready to inspire the students,
ready to take these kids on a journey through math
they would remember for the rest of their lives.
And then I stood in front of my first class --
(Laughter)
trying to deliver a lecture about solving linear equations
and all I could see were puzzled and distant looks
on the faces of 42 students.
And as the day wore on, reality set in.
The first problem was the way that I approached the English language.
The kids thought I sounded kind of cool,
but many of the words and phrases I used
were so quintessentially British,
it left them feeling confused.
The second issue was that the entire class
was repeating Algebra 1 for the third time.
(Laughter)
It wasn't that funny when I was standing there, trust me!
The kids had switched off to math long before I'd even got there.
And then -- and this really was not funny --
half of the students got stuck multiplying seventeen times nine,
in a high school Algebra 1 class.
And this is a routine third grade math problem.
And I knew the magnitude of the challenge I was facing
was huge, in both algebra and geometry classes.
But what was I doing wrong?
In my geometry class, I was teaching the way I'd been taught:
I'd draw a triangular prism on the board,
plug in some numbers, do an exercise on the board,
ask the kids to complete the questions in the book.
Does that sound familiar?
Yeah, it wasn't working.
In fact, I was telling the kids everything,
and yet they were learning practically nothing.
And then one evening I was at the supermarket.
and I'm standing in line staring at the candy in the checkout line.
And suddenly it hit me.
And I realized there was something I could use
to completely change the way I taught math
and something that I knew every kid in my class
would relate to:
chocolate.
So, I grabbed a dozen different bars
and decided to use them in a new type of math lesson,
one that challenged the students,
not to memorize formulas,
but challenged them to think
about something they could see, touch, feel and even taste.
The lesson became a single question --
why make a chocolate bar in the shape of a triangular prism?
At first the kids were totally confused.
What do you mean why?
Cause it looks cute!
They weren't used to being asked to think, especially not in math.
But I wanted them to struggle.
I wanted them to figure it out for themselves.
And eventually, working together, they did.
By investigating the geometry of chocolate
my students learned that with this simple shape
the manufacturer saves money
needing the smallest amount of chocolate
to fill the largest looking chocolate bar.
Wooo. Yeah.
(Laughter)
Now my kids realized they were paying more
but getting less, and that got their attention.
And the best bit, I hadn't told them how to find the answer.
I hadn't event told them how to figure this out.
They figured it out for themselves.
And my students learnt, or were beginning to learn,
an even a bigger lesson: math is more than numbers.
In fact, it's economics, it's design. Math is a language
we use to describe this incredible world around us.
So I threw out all my textbooks
and I redesigned every single math class
using intriguing puzzles and everyday hands on math problems.
And guess what? Test scores went up.
In fact, 85% of my students passed classes that they'd previously failed.
And the best bit, they found out love for math.
That thing I'd been searching for, that passion,
that fever for math I wanted for them from the very beginning.
I loved teaching in the classroom,
but I wanted to reach more kids.
This was working. I wanted to reach more of the students and help them.
So I took a position as a math expert with the Los Angeles School District
training teachers, thousands of teachers,
to do what I had done in the classroom.
And the effort was huge,
but the impact on kids felt small.
Teachers struggled to change, struggled to let go
of the way that they'd always done things and I knew there
had to be a better way for me to reach more kids.
And I knew it would involve technology.
The trouble is even today's technology
is used to replicate the same dry teaching methods
we have been using for a hundred of years
and it shows -- it really shows.
If we're really going to teach kids to speak math,
they need active learning experiences, where they're guided.
But guided to figure it out for themselves.
I knew what I wanted the technology to do.
I just didn't quite know how to do it.
I was stuck. I was frustrated.
And then one day, about three years ago, on a routine visit
to an elementary school in South Central, Los Angeles,
I walked into a computer lab and my learning-is-happening radar went off.
Looking around the room I saw kids fixated on their screens
playing a game, solving problems, and as you can see having fun.
So I looked more closely at this game they were playing,
and gradually it dawned on me what these kids were doing.
They were thinking several steps ahead and figuring out
a sequence of rotations to get this little penguin
across the screen from the left to the right.
And this was first grade.
These 7 year-olds were doing multistep problem solving
in their heads and the best bit, the software
never told them how to do it, they tried out their own ideas,
and they got to see whether it was right or wrong.
And then they had to figure it out for themselves.
Who made this game? I was hooked.
This is what I needed.
So I did the only thing I could possibly do.
I handed in my notice, researched the company,
guessed the CTO's e-mail address and begged
this little non-profit neuroscience company
to hire me to build visual math games starring
a penguin -- named Gigi. (Laughter)
Seriously, Gigi.
And now, I am the director of content creation,
building visual math games starring aliens,
who shoot holes in bridges that need to be filled with fractions of blocks --
petals that need to be scooped up in different size bunches
to teach kids about place value, and balloons that are arranged
in a parabola that need to be burst with a rocket
with special controls, and of course -- Gigi,
this little penguin that kids love to help to cross the screen.
And it's working.
In fact, these games and puzzles are transforming
math success for half a million students.
Today, right now, half a million students.
(Applause)
Thank you.
(Applause)
In some of the toughest school districts
throughout the country and as we expand,
as we build this from kindergarten through calculus,
we can level a playing field, we can give all kids the chance
to compete in this global economy
because think about it: everything around us
-- this theater we're sitting in, our mobile devices,
even the streaming video of today's event --
all are built using science, technology, engineering and math.
And the kids who can speak that language
are going to define the 21st century.
Now, as a high school teacher, the geometry of chocolate
helped me redefine the relevance of mathematics
for 42 kids in one class in Los Angeles.
And now this little penguin is redefining math
for a generation of students.
And my wish, my wish is that one day all children
will get the chance to experience the beauty of mathematics,
maybe in something as small and simple
and as wondrous as a little piece of chocolate.
Thank you.
(Applause)