“Are we playing Dimension M today?”

This is what you’ll often hear in math classrooms across middle school classrooms in ACPS. Dimension M is an online, multi-player video game that requires students to answer math problems to earn points and power up. In other words, students log on, design and avatar and enter a virtual world where they tackle challenges and avoid obstacles. Their main goal is to answer math questions that show their knowledge on topics from properties of multiplication, to estimating results, to calculating rate of change. As you can imagine, students are leaning forward in their seats, shouting with enthusiasm, and begging for more time to play.

Across the nation, schools are seeing that games can be “effective tools for teaching complex ideas because they:

• use action instead of explanation,
• create personal motivation and satisfaction,
• accommodate various learning styles and skills,
• reinforce mastery,
• provide interactive, decision making context (Charles & McAlister, 2004; Holland, Jenkins, & Squire, 2002).