The Advance Team's Ellen Mangels

"I get very nervous with games," says algebra teacher and Advance Team member Ellen Mangels, "when monsters are trying to eat me!'

While those Lure of the Labyrinth monsters might have made Ellen nervous at first, they’ve now become her friends, and she’s become a great advocate for the game and for the idea of using digital learning games in general. And that should be no surprise given Ellen’s longstanding use of “out of the box” teaching tools as a department chair and teacher at the Cockeysville (MD) Middle School. Though she says she’s “not really a gamer,” she’s always been ready to “use anything you can to make [learning] interesting for the kids.” And if that means occasionally using scavenger hunts to teach algebra, then so be it. “I could have just made dittos and given them to the kids,” she says, “but that just would have been boring.” According to Ellen, if you want to teach children well, “you’re going to have to meet them at their interest level.”

That’s why Ellen thinks games like Lure of the Labyrinth can be such powerful teaching tools. And she doesn’t just think it, she knows it… because Ellen’s already begun to use the game with her students. She recently had one of her classes play the Lure of the Labyrinth puzzle, “The Lab.” And the class in question wasn’t filled with high achievers, either. “These were the kids who don’t have a lot confidence,” she explains, “the ones who usually try to avoid doing the work.” And how did it go? Well, Ellen says that her students managed to do fine with the first levels of the puzzle dealing with whole numbers, but that they struggled with the more complex levels involving fractions. So she stopped the game play for a bit and taught them a lesson on fractions. Her students, Ellen says, were “much more motivated than usual to learn the fractions because they wanted to be able to use them in the game.” After her lesson, the students went back to “The Lab” puzzle and according to Ellen, “they really got it.”

Ellen knows that, even with such experiences, it’s going to take some work to convince teachers and administrators to use Lure of the Labyrinth with their students. In fact, she herself was initially skeptical about using the game. “My biggest concern,” she says, “was the time. Was the game going to be an add-on or a replacement?” But now Ellen’s found that she can “actually take stuff out of the textbook and replace it with parts of the game.” It takes some thought, she says, but “it can be done” and she’s seen the positive results with her students. “One of the great benefits of this game,” she explains, “is that it really helps students build their confidence to be able to find answers to math problems.”

Maybe those monsters aren’t that scary after all….

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