We all know that most people are bad at math, and it’s understandable. Math is a very abstract subject, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to learn. Everything is possible if you invest enough knowledge, time, and effort.
One of the best ways of teaching an apparently complicated domain is by relating it to real life, and that also works for math. But we can even take that to an entirely new level by making the teaching process fun and interactive. Here are a few methods:
Encourage math talk
We get it, you want for your students to become like all those cool and smart guys who talk about astrophysics, such as Michio Kaku, Neil deGrasse Tyson, or Max Tegmark. They’ll definitely have to learn math to be like those scientists, and that means they have to practice it by competing with other people. Trying to prove that you’re better than others is one of the strongest ways of making the learning process fun.
Offer small rewards
Offering rewards to your students could be more difficult, but you can definitely do it with your children. Those rewards don’t have to be anything fancy – taking them out to the park or buying a new cool video game could be enough.
Play Sudoku
Sudoku isn’t exactly a math game, but it does make the player get used to numbers. Sudoku is a logic game where the players have to add the right digits in squares so that they will have all the digits from 1 to 9 in both horizontal and vertical lines. Sudoku stimulates logic, creativity, memory, and other critical areas of human thinking. Playing such puzzle games can help make your training program fun and interactive.
As the cosmologist Max Tegmark once said, we all live in a mathematical Universe. Michio Kaku even takes it to the next level by saying that God could be a mathematician: “The mind of God we believe is cosmic music, the music of strings resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace. That is the mind of God.” Therefore, start teaching math only after you’ve spoken about the importance of it and how it can be helpful – from calculating your money to buy groceries, making the plan of a complex building, or figuring out the distance to a star.
Tim M. Hill helped bring Digital-Overload from a weekly newsletter to a full-fledged news site by creating a new website and branding. He continues to assist in keeping the site responsive and well organized for the readers. As a writer to Digital-Overload, Tim mainly covers mobile news and gadgets.
