by Derek Ray
A new competition has taken hold of students enrolled in math teacher Hileman's Math 2 and financial literacy classes. Hileman is challenging his students to face off using Khan Academy’s Learnstorm. As explained by Hileman, “LearnStorm is an annual campaign involves hundreds of thousands of students and tens of thousands of teachers across the country.” So this isn’t just some small battle between his classes; it is a national campaign that involves thousands of teachers and students.
Hileman joined the Mustang Family this past August and he felt it was important to not only learn about Minarets culture, but add new and exciting opportunities to the school. "I have done this project in the past and have seen a huge impact on how students view math." Hileman explained, "The project teaches students that the struggle and mistakes are an important part of the learning process and that the difficult moments students experience in Math are positive in their development as students."
The competition includes two parts. The first part involves a Growth Mindset Project where, according to Hileman, "students apply a growth mindset to their classes and other skills outside of school. It involves short videos of famous and successful people applying a Growth Mindset to their personal and professional development." The second component is a competition among classes to complete tasks/quizzes in Khan Academy. The school and donations are contributing a lunch and Starbucks gift cards to the winning class.
"The competition simply measures the percentage of completed tasks/quizzes for each class and levels the class up the more that get done. In the past, I’ve had classes reach level 20 by Halloween. As of today, the highest class is on level 4, but momentum is building.”
Even the students had some words to add to Hileman’s statement, “I think this competition is pretty cool so far, I’ve never really done something like Learnstorm before. I do feel pretty confident that Period 2 will succeed in the end. But there’s a long way to go.”
Mr. Hileman has an exciting competition and it’s far from over. The question remains, who will win this competition at the end of the month?
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