Posted by: pjhutton | July 3, 2009

Exploring the World of Applets

In exploring the site, http://mathforum.org/escotpow/puzzles/   I discovered the applet called Fractis. It opens up a game where students try to create bars by putting together fractional parts to fill up a box and earn points. One fractional part of the bar drops in and then students add fractional parts trying to equal one whole bar. If the fractions add up to one whole, the bar disappears and the player earns 10 points. They try to form as many bars as possible in 250 seconds.

My students often have difficulty trying to identify equivalent common fractions. After working with fraction tiles as a whole group and working with small groups, I would allow students to use the  applet for independent practice. When they have had time to master the game, I would then challenge them to create their own game for identifying equivalent fractions. Students could exchange games and play them. As a final step in the process students would make a journal entry in their interactive notebooks describing their steps to master the game, how they developed their own game, and then analyze their classmates’ games. I would follow up the lesson with a discussion about how the games worked to help them learn equivalent fractions.

Advertisement

Responses

  1. Pat,

    This is one of my favorite sites! Students do struggle with fractions at both the middle and high school level. For some reason, it just doesn’t stick. Maybe visiting more sites like this will help our students better internalize fractions.

    Judy


Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

Categories

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.