RUME 27
2025
Alexandria, Virginia
Floating in a Most Peculiar Way: The Role of Feedback in a Playful Calculus Task
Page: 545
We created and piloted a playful calculus-based activity called Major Tom with preservice secondary mathematics teachers over two classroom sessions. Players create sequences of jetpack boosts (accelerations), controlling an astronaut’s movements to arrive at a pick-up location at a particular time. The learning goal was for students to draw upon and enhance their knowledge of integration to determine velocities and displacements. We found that the imprecision of the system’s feedback inhibited the students’ productive use of their formal calculus knowledge, while on the other hand an instructor-led structured discussion about velocity graphs supported it. Neither of these features of the playful math environment much affected the students’ playfulness, but a third feature, the opportunity to create and solve your own challenges, fostered significantly increased play and laughter. This contributes to our broader goal of how to elicit play with undergraduates while simultaneously engaging and building their formal mathematics knowledge.