The irony of the emphasis on speed is that some of our world’s leading mathematicians are not fast at math. Laurent Schwartz—who won math’s highest award, the Fields medal, in 1950—wrote in his autobiography that he was a slow thinker in math, who believed he was “stupid” until he realized that “what is important is to deeply understand things and their relations to each other. This is where intelligence lies. The fact of being quick or slow isn’t really relevant.”
Source: Why Math Education in the U.S. Doesn’t Add Up – Scientific American
Many games use time as an obstacle. As educators how can we use timers to motivate our learners? This is a very difficult area of gamification to navigate. If you place a timer on an activity it will make it more challenging but may have the reverse effect of what you intended and leave students feeling like quitting if they can’t make the deadline. Another downside is that, as quoted above, we may be giving the wrong message that we value speed and quantity of tasks completed over quality and exploration., thus meeting a short term goal (finish a task) at the expense of a long term goal (deep learning).
Personally I use time restraints can create a playfully competitive atmosphere when attached to practice tasks that have no direct impact on assessment. However, strategies are needed to adjust the activity so slower student’s are not disadvantaged. Using a simple spreadsheet, or sticky notes, gives me this kind of flexibility to rewrite the rules of the game on the fly to suit arising needs. For example, the Lesson Plan on “Team Challenge” specifically uses groups to avoid individual embrassment at failing. Usually these groups are those who sit together and are at a similar skill level. So you can easily predict which group will come first or last. To balance this out I collect the papers from the fastest group exactly on time and start reading out and discussing their answers. It takes a few minutes to do this and tally up their review scores. Meanwhile the slowest group just had a sneaky few minutes to finish their reviews.
Fly Lady aims to motivate housekeepers through a series of tasks. One interesting tactic she suggests is to select a hotspot area in your home and put in a timer for 5 minutes and commit to spending just a few minutes re-organising items. This is a really effective way of addressing the mental barrier of thinking that a task requires more effort and time than it really does. I wonder how we could use this technique in a classroom. Please make a comment with your ideas.