Starting Up our Algebra Game

Software is eating the world. Yet, it is a marvel of how readily the younger generation eats up software like Angry Bird, Storybird, Youtube, mobile app games etc.

We have learned an enormous insight to the Terence Tao's algebra game and want to make this fun game accessible to more people especially the younger generation. In the next few months, as we launch some of the mobile app software revolving around the Algebra Game, I hope that this is one small step towards developing learning technologies that make an impact no matter how small. To make Advance Personalized Learning at scale possible, we want to make learning mathematics and computer science a cool thing for everyone. 

Check us out at http://www.algebragamification.com. We will post pictures of our learning endeavours on our Algebra Game Facebook Page and hope to release more fun software in the future  — stay tuned!

Terence Tao's Algebra Game

Terence Tao, a famous mathematics professor at the UCLA, blogged about various issues on Gamifying High-School Mathematics in 2012. He also introduced an interesting mathematical puzzle to gamify elementary algebra, i.e., solving a single linear algebra equation with one variable, on his blog.

The idea of Tao's algebra game is to reduce a given linear algebra equation to "x = numerical_solution" through a selection of a finite number of given clues. This algebra game was created using the MIT Scratch software tool and can be played here (requires Java). Let's give an example using a screenshot of the game (taken from Tao's blog) as shown below. Initially, the puzzle is the algebra equation "5x + 3 = x + 11" and the given clues are the three possibilities "Subtract 1", "Divide by 2" and "Subtract x". A player chooses one of the possibilities by clicking on the avatar icon. Say, suppose the player chooses "Subtract 1", the algebra equation changes to "5x + 2 = x + 10" (since both sides of the original equation "5x + 3 = x + 11" get subtracted by one).

Of course, one possible "solution" to the puzzle below is the sequence of "Subtract 1" then "Subtract x" then "Divide by 2" then "Subtract 1"and then finally "Divide by 2" to yield "x = 2". A total of five moves to reach the desired state. What matters is not the final value of x (which can be eye-balled easily), rather, it is the inquisitive problem-solving process while playing.





Tao's algebra game is absolutely fun (and some of the higher levels are fairly challenging, even for an adult like me).  The benefit is obvious: children learn a real subject (e.g., elementary algebra) while playing.  Particularly pleasant is the mathematical depth behind the game. The twelve levels (from easy to hard) in Tao's Scratch mock-up version were cleverly hand-crafted. Yet, there are a few intriguing questions:  First, how to engineer the difficulty level of the game automatically?   Second, how does a computer (not human player) solve a given puzzle efficiently, i.e., with the fewest number of moves?   Third, how to engage the human players in an entertaining manner so that they keep on playing it and, unknowingly, develop a better number sense or mathematical intuition and that such an improvement can be measured?

Another practical question is the means by which these kind of educational games can be readily deployed on existing computing platforms to reach the target audience players (in this case, the target audience is presumably 8 to 12 years old primary school students, and why not adults? I like playing it too). The MIT Scratch software tool is relatively easy (even for 6 years-old) to create games and animations on desktop PC's and laptops, and accessible only through a web browser.  If this were a Facebook game, can it reach K12 students since Facebook requires users to be older than 13?  If this were a mobile app game, can it reach the target audience who may not have personal mobile devices or audience who only have desktop PC's and laptops?

Claude Shannon: Centennial and Machines

Claude Shannon and his electromechanical mouse Theseus. Retrieved from http://www.kerryr.net/pioneers/gallery/ns_shannon5.htm

Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was a distinguished American electrical engineer and mathematician who founded the field of Information Theory when he published his landmark paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" in 1948. He worked on anti-aircraft and cryptography systems during World War II, and later on had a career at the AT&T Bell Labs and as a Professor at MIT. The MIT Technology Review Magazine ran an article on this Reluntant Father of the Digital Age shortly after his death.

In fact, while Shannon was still a student at MIT, he wrote what has been touted as the Most Important Master's Thesis of the Twentieth Century (putting forward the idea that Boolean algebra can be used for computing). Many technological fields that we know of now (such as the digital revolution, secrecy and cryptography, artificial intelligence, wearable computing) can all be traced back to Shannon's pioneering ideas and work.

Despite all these achievements, Shannon is surprisingly little known. Next year 2016 is Shannon's centenary. To get the public know more about Shannon, the Information Theory Society is on a drive to make a movie about this scientific genius of the twentieth century. Incidentally, Shannon did appear in a movie once - back in 1961 - in a MIT Centennial Film called The Thinking Machine. At 50:09 mins of the film, he shared his vision of a future machine capable of learning by experience. The Information Theory Society also aims to organize events worldwide to celebrate the Shannon's centenary. 

I wonder: What little bits of things can we do to celebrate Shannon's centenary?

Worth noting is Shannon's fun-loving and unconventional side: To amuse himself, Shannon created very clever mechanical and electrical toys -- a juggling robot, a flame-throwing trumpet, a maze-solving mouse, a chess-playing machine, a mind-reading machine, a manipulator to solve the Rubik's cube game etc. The Ultimate Machine is another such curiously uncanny toy -- we have one built from a small motor, off-the-shelf electronics and recyclable. See video below.

In a 1987 interview, the Omni Magazine asked Shannon: Do you find it depressing that chess computers are getting so strong? 

Shannon replied: I am not depressed by it. I am rooting for the machines! I have always been on the machines' side. Ha-ha! 

Googling Arithmetic Limerick

While using Google to scour the Internet for poems on arithmetic and algebra, I came across the following three limericks. The first is similar in spirit to the Carroll's poem and the next two are similar to Diophantus puzzle in my earlier posts. 

Leigh Mercer, a noted British wordplay, wrote the following (excerpt from Word Ways, 1980, pp. 36):

A dozen, a gross, and a score 

Plus three times the square root of four 

Divided by seven 

Plus five times eleven 

Is nine squared and not a bit more.

Interestingly, Google's omnipotent search engine can "solve" this limerick automatically by entering the following slightly modified verse into the Google search bar:

(a dozen, and a gross, and a score plus three times the square root of four) divided by seven plus five times eleven



The following two are by David Pleacher, a retired mathematician:

Said a certain young lady named Gwen 
of her tally of smitten young men, 
"One less and three more 
Divided by four 
Together give one more than ten." 

How many boyfriends had she? Answer here.

Some freshmen from Trinity Hall 
Played hockey with a wonderful ball; 
They found that two times its weight, 
Plus weight squared, minus eight, 
Gave "nothing" in ounces at all. 

What was the weight of the ball? Answer here.

Learning and Testing

In many Asian countries, standardized testing is the hallmark of primary and secondary school education. Outside of regular schools, numerous after-school coaching activities, preparation schools and commercial tuition centers thrive in training young students to excel in standardized testing. This is big business - involving enormous education spending in the hope of getting a good enough grade for these pressure-cooker standardized tests.

In places like Hong Kong and Singapore, primary and secondary school students sit en masse for UK-style standardized exams (O-level, AS-level, A-level). The sense of anxiety and dread often lingers among these students in the lead-up to the public exams. In the hot summer month of June in mainland China, massive number of students travel across the country to sit for the national higher education entrance examination - a high-stakes game - that requires gadgets like multi-rotor drones as invigilators.

I recently came across an Edweek article "Rethinking the Emphasis on Standardized Testing" on the traditional standardized testing in Asia and how it affected mathematics proficiency and even the lifetime success of a student. The article's author started a First-in-Math venture to host math tournaments in the United States to play 24 Game - in fact a card game that originates from China in the 1960's. Have a go at the 24 Game to test your reflex and sharpen your mind (The game at http://www.4nums.com is free)! Public examination and standardized testing in Asia are big business indeed - going by the government spending of 3-4% of GDP on education.

One interesting takeaway from the Edweek article is that:
Testing has its place as long as it doesn’t push kids away from a sense of wonder and fascination for the world around them....  A far more worthy goal would be to create a system wherein the whole individual is addressed, developed, and encouraged to thrive in the pursuit of a better life. 

I think this pretty much sums up personalized learning as the next frontier in education. What truly amazing technological innovations can we invent in this quest to advance personalized learning? Will that be an ecosystem of mobile digital tutors, an Internet of peer learning, automated software to individualize learning, learning analytics at scale, smarter interactive computer tests driven by computational neuroscience, AI, cloud computing and machine learning? Or will it be more powerful surveillance drones?

Diophantus Puzzle

Diophantus was a Greek mathematician whose work laid down important foundation for the development of algebra. Listed on Wikipedia is an interesting puzzle to guess the age of Diophantus:

'Here lies Diophantus,' the wonder behold.

Through art algebraic, the stone tells how old:

'God gave him his boyhood one-sixth of his life,

One twelfth more as youth while whiskers grew rife;

And then yet one-seventh ere marriage begun;

In five years there came a bouncing new son.

Alas, the dear child of master and sage

After attaining half the measure of his father's life chill fate took him. 

After consoling his fate by the science of numbers for four years, he ended his life.'

This Diophantus puzzle has a similar flavor to the Carroll's puzzle in my previous post. Here, however, a finite sequence of moves (in fact, events in the timeline) is applied to an unknown - Diophantus's age. 
How long did Diophantus live?

Carrollian Algebra

Alice talking to White and Red Queens

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking Glass are some of the well-known children's classic tales written by Lewis Carroll, whose real name is Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematics lecturer at Oxford University. 

There are various algebra games designs embedded in Carroll's work. Let's use a few examples to illustrate. 

The first example is quiz-based design that comes from an excerpt in Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll:

'Can you do Addition?' the White Queen asked. 'What's one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one?'

'I don't know,' said Alice. 'I lost count.'

'She can't do Addition,' the Red Queen interrupted, 'Can you do Subtraction? Take nine from eight.'

'Nine from eight I can't, you know,' Alice replied very readily: 'but—'

'She can't do Subtraction,' said the White Queen. 'Can you do Division? Divide a loaf by a knife—what's the answer to that?'

----

Both Alice and the reader are entertainingly quizzed by the Queens. Try arguing with arithmetic!

The second example is puzzle-based design that comes from an excerpt in The Hunting of the Snark, by Lewis Carroll: 

Taking Three as the subject to reason about --
     A convenient number to state--
We add Seven, and Ten, and then multiply out 
    By One Thousand diminished by Eight.

The result we proceed to divide, as you see, 
    By Nine Hundred and Ninety and Two:
Then subtract Seventeen, and the answer must be 
    Exactly and perfectly true.

----

In a way, the Carroll's puzzle-based design is similar to the Jinx Puzzle introduced by Harold Jacob in his book Elementary Algebra (1979). 

In Carroll's puzzle game, an initial number (can be any and need not be Three) first gets manipulated through a finite sequence of arithmetic moves (the above first stanza) to become another numerical result. A second finite sequence of arithmetic moves (the above second stanza) is then carefully chosen to go from this numerical result back to the initial number. Thus, the two finite sequences are essentially inverse of each other.

In Jacob's Jinx Puzzle game, an initial number (can be chosen from a few possibilities) goes through a carefully-crafted finite sequence of arithmetic moves to become a particular desired numerical result, giving the impression that All roads lead to Rome.

Exploring Algebra Games

Maria Andersen recently wrote a blog article with a nicely-made Prezi video giving an overview of existing games out there in the market to learn elementary school algebra.

Many of these games are commercial and they seem to have good and catchy graphics. It seems that most of the game design are primarily quiz-based. There are also a few puzzle-like ones that require players to develop a playing strategy. It will be interesting to think of different game design for learning algebra. 

Another observation is that many of these games are mobile apps that run on smartphones or tablets. Imagine the super duper ease of getting the games off-the-shelf from Google Play and Apple app stores and playing them instantly. Mobile app platforms have thus made mathematical games more accessible for many people. One wonders the possibility of a math teacher deploying these apps in a real classroom, and how would such math games complement the teaching curriculum? 

In the first place, teachers have to vet these games and find one that suits the curriculum. Given that teachers are busy, it is not easy to get real statistics or data to show how useful the mobile games are as a teaching aid and whether the students actually learn. But suppose a teacher picks a mobile game, then what game design might attract the teacher and the students?  

Quiz-based games in some sense "digitize" the paper-and-pencil approach to working on a fixed set of questions, possibly providing hints in the form of multiple choice. Quiz-based games can certainly be useful for drilling. On the other hand, puzzle-type games are typically harder to design, because it involves the element of strategic thinking. If we can instil in students the idea that learning mathematics is to think strategically, then this can be a more efficient way for students to build self-motivation and take on challenging problems as compared to the quiz-based game design.

Explorer - The First Step

Yes, that's you - you're the explorer.
"Explorer?"
[ From the Preface: Games & Puzzles, Discovering the Art of Mathematics by V. Ecke and C. von Renesse with J. F. Fleron and P. K. Hotchkiss, 2015 ]

In 2008, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) made Advance Personalized Learning as one of the fourteen grand challenges for engineering in the 21st century. Since then we have witnessed the emergence of amazing technologies for learning such as mobile tech, MOOC, flipped classroom, social learning networks, Youtube, gamification, .... Everyone learns mathematics differently. Can a math teacher cater to the different learning style of each and every student?

Perhaps, we can start by teaching children, K12 students and even adults to see mathematics as not just arithmetic or algebra. Mathematical skills and knowledge can be shaped through playing. This is the journey to explore the less trodden paths of personalized learning through innovations in computer science.