Teaching math can be challenging. Kids only pay attention to what they like and cool math games are so much more interesting than a textbook. As a parent, I resorted to hunting the internet for math games to help my kids memorize times tables. I thought it would help to use the tech tools we now have at our fingertips. While my children enjoyed the games, the math concepts did not stay around for long in their heads. They understood and learned more from textbooks and real-world manipulatives.
A lot of math can be understood better with manipulatives and real-world examples. Using things you have lying around the house can work best, especially if you make it into a game and let your child gather up a pile of favorite items to use for a math lesson. One popular example is Legos. Every parent has Legos floating around their house, and they come with those super handy pegs on them that make counting and understanding sizes so easy and tactile for younger children. Using Legos to teach math has even been adopted by schoolteachers and is used to learn fractions, addition and subtraction, and even squares and roots. There are many other examples of using the real world to teach math, and in Doodles Do AlgebraTM, I introduce a wide variety of options that are embedded into the daily workbook exercises and even more that I include in the teacher’s guides so parents can try different ways of teaching. Every child learns differently and trying different teaching methods makes the difference between having a child master math and one who grows up hating it.
Of all the options for teaching out there, many people use videos. If a teacher or parent gives a child a video to explain something, it frees up time for other activities. Children love watching videos, so you would think it makes sense. Especially the short-format videos you find on YouTube or BrainPop that promise to ‘engage, excite, and challenge every child.’ Who doesn’t want their child to develop a love of learning and grow into a high-achieving adult? Also, many of the short-format educational videos out there are available free, which makes them a seemingly perfect option to learn concepts and idea, including math.
It turns out that short-format math videos do not actually teach math. They entertain but don’t educate. A group of researchers from the University of Trento in Italy and from the NeuroSpin Center in France recently published an article entitled ‘Evaluating the impact of short educational videos on the cortical networks for mathematics‘. Basically, we already know which areas of the brain are used for math and using imaging technology. Researchers can watch those areas light up when people use math to solve problems. The researchers who conducted this study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and discovered that when children watch math videos, they do not use the math part of their brain, but the ‘entertainment’ part (for want of a better phrase). That seems fine on the surface. Children are enjoying the videos as they watch them and they can easily do the same problems covered in the videos. The problem is that when the children recall the math concepts and try to use them to solve similar problems, they access the ‘entertainment’ area of their brain and NOT the math or quantitative area. They actually use that ‘entertainment’ part of their brains to repeat the problems from the videos because that was the area the information was stored. The cognitive areas of their brains, however, are not engaged and so they cannot extend the simple concepts learned in the short videos into broader math concepts that can be combined and used to solve any problem they come across. The short-form math videos are fun but not teaching the children to use the math covered in the video.
To me, this is a fascinating result. Entertainment is passive. Learning, if effective, is active. When you learn to bake a cake, you go read the recipe, grab all the ingredients and put it all together, and bake it yourself. You cannot learn to bake a cake simply by watching a short video about it. It is fun to watch, but it does not teach you and you are not learning. You are simply being entertained.