Students in whatever grade level maybe, games are part of them. Most of their time consumes playing games on their computers, internet, and even in their smart phone. But the few places they could not play games is in the school classrooms. Classroom teachers have gain idea with this thought on how to use game as part of their lessons so that everybody in the class would participate. There are proposal suggesting that students and teachers can become more comfortable and more successful with mathematics if they are exposed to meaningful activities that reinforce and extend their current knowledge. Almost everybody in the class would like to become a player to compete in the game. Teachers will have the opportunities to create math lessons to become more innovative with the use of game to inspire the students and to enjoy the challenge of learning mathematics.
Mathematical games as part of the lesson have been engaged for drill activities, practice exercises and motivations for the lessons. The efficiency and influence of the game as an instructional tool requires more study if the games are to be applied for teaching mathematics.
Marcus Guido in his article in a blog dated January 5,2017 said that playing math games has emerged as a way to make class engaging, but you must ensure these activities build skills and reinforce lesson content. “Gifford and Latham (2013) concluded that teachers hold the power to create, or remove, glass ceilings on children’s mathematical attainment. While Jave Mustafam, Alam Khan,Atta Ullah, 2011 said that games are considered to be unavoidable factor for enhancing and accelerating the teaching process. Because games can be used as a tool in the classroom to engage students (Mustafam J. Khan. A, Ullah, 2011).
From another perspective, gaming experience has also been recommended and incorporated to support and enrich the learning process (Hsu & Wang, 2010). The game has an important place in children’s thinking on the numbers and initiating and maintaining mathematical communication (TrawickSmith, Swaminathan, & Liu, 2016). The game has an important place in children’s thinking on the numbers and initiating and maintaining mathematical communication (TrawickSmith, Swaminathan, & Liu, 2016). As long as the game based approaches are used in classrooms, the mathematical consciousness of children is expected to increase (Marcus, Perry, Dockett, & MacDonald, 2016).
Game playing was not only a fun process but also a learning opportunity for students to use their mathematics. Mathematics as a hard subject for many students find a way to remove this conception through the use of games employing lessons in mathematics.
Math anxiety is destructive to success in mathematics. Fear in mathematics subject results in avoiding the subject itself and all related activities in school. Because of this factor students’ performance suffers. For these individuals, avoiding mathematics is as natural a response as avoiding pain, since, to them, even the mere anticipation of being confronted with a mathematical problem can be painful (Lyons and Beilock, 2012). Math anxiety may have an effect on math performance at several different levels. Firstly, evidence suggests that people with math anxiety are less willing to engage with math tasks at all ( Carey, E., Hill, F., Devine, A., & Szucs, D. 2017).
The teachers’ use of games and creative pedagogical applications might be helpful for enhancing students’ attitudes towards mathematics (Afari, Aldridge, Fraser, & Khine, 2013). Math is an important subject in school. It teaches us to understand and calculate numbers, helps us to logical thinking and analyzing. Sometimes math can be boring. It is great if we can make math fun for students, so that they will enjoy learning this important subject. If children play a math game at school or at home without reflection afterwards, then chances are they have wasted an opportunity for learning. (Dr Catherine Attard, April 12, 2015). Similarly, a student who has been reluctant to study math in the traditional way could be assigned to a study group that is playing or coding games. Educators should deploy alternatives to engage various learning types (Chorianopoulos & Giannakos, 2014).
