Games for Gains

School:: Emerald Coast Middle School
Subject:: STEM Education
Teacher:: Rachel Carroll
Students Impacted:: 90
Grade:: 5
Date:: October 9, 2017

Investor

Thank you to the following investor for funding this grant.

CHELCO - $450.78

Goal

My goal this year is to help my students improve their problem solving skills by strengthening their cognitive abilities using a more hands on approach.

This grant would help me buy logic games, challenge puzzles, and math books for my students, meeting the Florida Core Math Standards of Algebraic Thinking and Geometry. They will build problem solving skills without knowing they are solving problems.

What will be done with my students

These games will impact all ninety-one of my students, as well as my future students. My students will take a pretest before every new unit. I will use my students' pretests to determine who has already mastered the standard we will be working on. If a student has already mastered the standard, he or she will be excused from a lesson and choose an activity he or she wants to work on. Games will range from logic puzzles to hands on algebraic equations.

In addition to letting the student work on these logic puzzles instead of sitting through a lesson on a subject he or she has already mastered, a student may work on one of these activities when he or she has finished his or her classroom assignments. I will be able to teach bell to bell and everyone will have something to work on. No one will be able to say, "I'm finished. Now what?"

I will be able to reuse these games and puzzles for years to come, positively impacting even more students! Each year I have between eighty and one hundred students who are all from different kinds of backgrounds and have different levels of math experience.

I will be responsible for determining who can work on these activities during class by assessing each student's ability of the subject matter.

Benefits to my students

My students will benefit from using hands on activities rather than jumping behind a screen. They will improve team building strategies, increase their social skills, while working on spatial insight, problem solving, planning, concentration, logic, and more.

I will measure my students' success by comparing the data from last year's Math FSA results to this year's Math FSA results. In the meantime, I will use short assessments to track their progress, specifically in Algebraic Thinking.

Budget Narrative

I'm requesting two-three sets of each game in order to give more students opportunities to play and learn at once!

S & H will be about $25, making the total around $475.00.

Items

#	Item	Cost
1	KEVA Brain Builders Game B00IECWX5G	$44.85
2	Logic Links Puzzle Box B000NR4BLY	$38.85
3	Brainwright Logic, Dice Dots Deduction Puzzle B00NY4XWWW	$59.97
4	Brainwright GeoBrix, Solve Build Create Puzzle B013C1HLSM	$46.05
5	Mindware – Q-bitz B0031P91LK	$59.85
6	SmartGames Quadrillion B00IZ0G3RQ	$52.50
7	SmartGames IQ Focus B06Y4CJNZ1	$29.97
8	SmartGames BACK 2 BACK B00DP7AHJE	$35.82
9	Nasco Sir Cumference Books - Set of 9 - TB26639	$59.95
10	Math Madness Book Set 978-193849218	$22.97
	Total:	$450.78

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