Scratch

Those that you have mentioned plus direction and distance, angles, percentages, comparison (Greater than/smaller than, equal), integers, rounding, division with remainders.

Also variables, equations, absolute value.

Unfortunately, scratch does not include any metric units, so it is not a great support for teaching them.

Is there a gallelry of math games. If not, shouldn't we start one.

Garry

You can also look for projects with the tag 'math':
http://scratch.mit.edu/tags/math

You could use my game "coverTHEspot" to investigate the area of a circle.
You can find it here:

http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/magicmark/62465

For the solution go to "coverTHEspotcheat"

Magic Mark






.

There are a lot of math projects in the Math Projects gallery, ranging from trivial drill programs written by kids just learning math facts to trigonometry, linear algebra, and calculus-based projects.
http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/view/6423

The "interactive buddy" game copy struck me as a great example of recursion, which might lead naturally into a discussion of fractals.  Anyone do fractals on Scratch yet?

I'm trying to copy some of the Monty Hall games I've seen before, both playing it and simulating a large number of trials with a chosen strategy.  The Monty Hall problem has recently come into the news again as some studied results in psychology have come into question (see NYTimes website, search "math").

There is aslo some advanced trig stuff like Sin, cos and tan. I don't think that is what you are looking for though.

Even projects that don't illustrate math concepts still use math concepts such as the ones you mentioned.  Controlling graphics is a very math intensive activity.

One that you didn't mention (but maybe someone else did) is angles.  You can rotate things by certain angles and you can position things.  I don't think Scratch uses the convention of what is considered  a positive and negative angle or what direction is considered facing 0 degrees though.

In trigonometry, we teach students that an angle has standard measure if its initial side is along the positive x-axis and then you move counter-clockwise for positive direction and clockwise for negative direction.  I have not yet compared this to how Scratch handles angles.  Forgetting all of that, if you are just concerned about teaching the magnitude of angles, that would be a good thing to helping students do things in Scratch.  Students need to know things such as 90 degrees is a right angle.  360 degrees is all the way around, etc.

You didn't mention the age range of the students that you are creating the handout for.  The concepts you mentioned plus the angle concepts are essential for any age student.  Older students might also want to learn a bit about vectors and matrices which can be very handy for controlling things.

Please post a link to your handout when you finish it if you are willing to share it!

Thanks

By chance, i came across this thread today, 2009-07-26, one year later the last post, so i'd like to know if there have been outcomes from things posted;

during these few days i have collected and downloaded projects tagged math or physics, but still a finer classification is needed for a teacher/educator willing to use them but with short time to search through the huge amount of proj. tagged that way

math is a too broader tag, IMHO one may need something like:
math/trigonometry
math/euclidean_geometry
math/basic_calculations
...
and so on

the same for physics

comments welcomed !