Poker to teach math; making learning fun

I subscribe to a feed that gives me news on the education world, and today's feed gave me two stories that go together perfectly.

The first is about using poker to teach math, and the second was about fun in learning. Seems like a good fit to me.

Charles Nesson is featured in this New York Times story about the benefits of using poker in math courses to teach math concepts and make those concepts real and relevant to students. Definitely a radical concept... Education has been a field in which moral precepts are taken seriously and promoted; it's hard to imagine educators, who tend to be pretty conservative socially, taking up this banner:

A Harvard Law School professor and a group of his students formed an organization this fall — the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society — dedicated to demonstrating that poker has educational benefits. They argue that the game, which is probability-based and requires risk assessment, situational analysis and a gift for reading people, can be an effective teaching tool, whether for middle school math or in business and law classes.

“I see great advantage in hitting kids as early as sixth grade, when they’re dropping out of math,” said Charles R. Nesson, the Harvard Law School professor who began the society with a group of his students. “I’m thinking of kids who are into their video games but instead of Halo-3 and World of Warcraft, we lead them into a game environment that has real intellectual depth to it, and feeds their curiosity rather than snuffs it out.”

The society has been working to establish chapters at campuses nationwide. This semester, it has sponsored seminars at Harvard featuring academics and authors to evangelize the wonders of poker. In the spring it plans to hold a workshop on using poker to teach math to children, to be held at the Smith Leadership Academy, a Boston charter school for at-risk kids in the sixth through eighth grades. “We see great potential for reaching our students in an innovative way,” said Karmala Sherwood, the school’s headmaster.

I've heard of Nesson before, and immediately remembered this feature from NPR on his ideas.

Nesson contends that poker is not the same as other types of gambling, because it's as much of a game of skill as it is one of luck. Lobbyists for the game are now trying to persuade Congress to legalize online poker.

The professor uses poker in his classes to teach students about decision making and risk. He describes poker as a game of two skills. The first is making good bets, or good investments. The second is being able to discern your opponent's strategy and story without revealing your own. "You put those two together and you have a dynamite poker player, or a dynamite lawyer, or a dynamite businessman," Nesson says. "You have dynamite."

Unfortunately, it's more and more rare that experimental teaching like this receives a serious consideration in our high stakes world of standardized testing. One of my complaints about the standardized testing movement is that it leads to more traditional approaches to teaching, more rote memorization and direct instruction, which tends to take the fun out of learning. The second story in my inbox is about that phenomenon, the tendency of the pressures of testing to make learning dull. From the UK's Independent:

Ministers have presided over the death of fun and play in the primary school curriculum, according to the results of an inquiry published today.

The inquiry, commissioned by the National Association of Head Teachers, recommends scrapping end-of-term national curriculum tests and primary school league tables.

It argues that they have damaged children's education by putting them off learning through too much repetitive teaching for tests.

Important graf from the Independent piece: "Fun and play are what motivate young children to want to learn and to go on learning."

Amen. Too often we lose sight of the fun in learning. Whatever you think of Mr. Nesson, at least he's remembered to keep learning fun.