Computer Games and Classrooms

When it comes to the conversation math provides, many people know only silence or something near silence. It is not even a conversation in a foreign language for these people. It is not a conversation at all. They have abandoned it because they have learned that they do not do it well and therefore should not do it at all.

In many classrooms, math is taught in a non-conversational, exclusionary way. People who do well with such studies find such settings perfectly comfortable. They do not learn what they cannot do. Others find the case the complete opposite. They learn only what they cannot do.

An alternative approach to the classroom would be to make it so that each day the goal is to find something everyone can do. Each day becomes an occasion of confirmation.

This book endeavors to be such a classroom. Professor Hardy, it is hoped, would approve. You are here because you want to carry on a conversation. The conversation has no solid end or aim beyond continuing the conversation.

This book is about mathematics for computer game development in the sense that it provides an approach to math that draws from classrooms in which computer game development and play have been the central activities. Such activities have shaped the understanding and teaching practices of the author. In such classrooms, the notion has prevailed that each day of class can offer something to everyone.

What characterizes a classroom extends to the games played and developed in classrooms. A computer program that allows you to converse mathematically or otherwise on an open basis often ends up being a computer game. What distinguishes a computer game from a computer application, a calculator, or a program is its extensibility—its open-endedness. A computer game that brings an open-ended, conversational experience to you becomes something similar to a shaded place on a sidewalk or a coffee shop.