Wii - Day 3

So yesterday (Friday) Chris and I did another round of Wii in the classroom. This time we used the baseball game (in Wii Sports) to review averaging. It is actually the training portion of Wii Sports, not the game itself. The pitcher throws 10 pitches and the computer will add up the total of all the home runs hit at the conclusion. If you don't hit a home run then you don't get any distance added in. But, it is always 10 pitches.
First Chris did a quick review of what averaging was and how to get an average (did this orally). Once she had the concept reviewed we brought each student up to get a swing. If they hit a home run then she marked down the distance on the board and the students each did it on their papers. If they didn't get a home run then we marked nothing. After each hit the student would pause the game so the next student could come on and take a swing. At the end of 10 swings we have a total (the game gives it to you so the students could check their addition on their papers) distance hit and we averaged that by the number of home run hits to get an average. Then the teacher did the math on the board to have students check their average work. We played 4 rounds which was enough to let each student get to bat twice. As before they were interested and excited about getting to play.

Some Notes:
1. The students really like the music. When we put the overhead speakers on you should see them all start bobbing their heads up and down. They can keep the beat and some of them even hum/sing along with the tune (just a music beat).
2. The hardest part for the students was remembering to hit the pause button after each swing! Especially if they hit a home run, they were too busy jumping up and down or giving their neighbor a high-five to remember! :-)
3. We were able to reinforce the idea of a repeating decimal (instead of a remainder) when the average didn't come to a whole number.
4. One student realized that he was able to do the math quickly in his head just by moving the decimal place over 1 spot since we were always dividing by 10.
5. Interesting to see some of the students timing when the ball is pitched. Some are right on, but some have very poor hand-eye coordination. Of course, this would probably improve with more practice with the console.
6. We are still using guest Mii's to play. That means none of the scores or information gets saved. We will have to begin to have the students make their own Mii's to play some of the other games. We are also going to need to make a Class Mii for when we are playing these whole class events (that way 1 student's Mii doesn't get an unfair advantage -either positive or negative -from all the others)!