Reflections on Curriculum Design Choices and Creating a Digital Game in Linear Algebra

Michelle Zandieh: 

Over the past 10 years our team has developed the Inquiry-Oriented Linear Algebra (IOLA) curriculum, designed for a first course in linear algebra typically taken by students in the USA majoring in a wide variety of STEM fields. An offshoot of this team has worked with undergraduates to develop two digital games, Vector Unknown (VU) and Vector Unknown: Echelon Seas (VUES).  

After a brief overview of the projects, this talk will look at examples of tasks and student thinking that allow us to reflect together about curriculum design choices. These choices range from (a) what experientially real setting to use for a task in IOLA, to (b) whether to use a paper and pencil task versus a digital game, to (c) the affordances and constraints of seemingly small changes made in game mechanics.   

picture of Michelle Zandieh

Michelle Zandieh

Bio: 

Michelle Zandieh is a professor at the Faculty of Science and Mathematics, Arizona State University. 

The bi-weekly ODD seminar series at CCSE

The Open Discussions on Didactics (ODD) is a seminar series on Mondays at 13:00-14:00 every other week (odd week numbers) at CCSE.

The seminar will be maximum one hour, often closer to half an hour. It is an informal arena to present and discuss learning theory, educational research and teaching experiences within computational science. To cater to the highly heterogeneous backgrounds and interests of students, teachers and researchers in our environment, we aim for seminars that introduce listeners to new ideas within a broad spectrum of aspects, and that invites reflection and discussion.

Presentations need not be mature and polished - to the contrary we hope that as many as possible wants to share undigested observations and reflections in short presentations of varied form and topics. We hope to have enough contributions to frequently have the meetings as lightning talk sessions, where three different speakers will each give a 5-10-minute presentation followed by discussion.

Published Sep. 29, 2023 7:03 PM - Last modified Oct. 23, 2023 12:10 PM