SALT LAKE CITY (ABC4 News) - School is out in the next few weeks for most Utah kids, but a Salt Lake City teacher is already calling the year a big success.
He's found a way to get his students to not only love math, but to say "it's better than recess!"
His classroom is definitely not typical. Sure students are working on computers, but they are also discussing story problems while sitting on the floor and moving tiny figures around on a giant board, and, wait a second, they are smiling!
"Do they like it? On the whole, they love it!" Teacher Scott Laidlaw first came up with the game Empires five years ago. He wanted to make math class more interactive, more imaginative. He wanted the students to learn through a story.
"The biggest problem in education is the giving of answers to questions that have not yet been asked. So we've got to create a setting or a scene where students say, oh! this is why I'm doing math. And when we do that, now we've got them," Laidlaw says.
The kids in his class at Realms of Inquiry, a private school for bright and gifted kids in Salt Lake City, are in fourth to eighth grade. But many are doing college level math.
"You know that you are doing math and thinking about it, but it doesn't seem like, oh, crap, I have to do some math now," says seventh grader Michaela Webb.
In the game, each student develops their own individual empire and then has to use mathematical components to keep their population alive. Students get so involved that even someone like sixth grader Ben Phan, who used to think math was dull, now says, "I think this might just be better than recess, yes. I'm not sure most kids would say that."
But most kids are saying it. Teacher Scott Laidlaw has gotten rid of textbooks, and in doing so, he's put math on the map.
Laidlaw has been talking to public schools across the state and across the West about using Empires in their classrooms. He says a complete on-line version should be available this September. For more information you can go to his website, imagineeducation.org
