In an epic battle royale of the popular Fortnite game versus middle school math, teachers fight to engage students in the curriculum. Providing a meaningful, relevant, and culturally responsive answer to the student question, “Why am I here in your classroom?” is an integral part of building relationships while teaching the curriculum. The challenge in the middle school math classroom is meeting students' diverse needs while keeping them interested in the math content. Learn how roles were reversed by embracing and respecting students where they are and what they feel is important to them. Math students will share their idea of taking the 7th grade math curriculum and applying it to the video game, Fortnite, allowing student culture to drive instruction. Through the connection to the Fortnite video game, students created an engaging connection into the 7th grade math curriculum. They self-designed math related problems, relationships, and models. Student collaborative tools used to create, engage, and discover the connection between Fortnite and the 7th grade math curriculum, such as Padlet, TinkerCad, and Google Apps, will be presented. Additionally, the use of Seesaw to capture authentic conceptual mathematical knowledge, as well as, to accommodate different learner needs through a variety of their creative tools will be shared. Tips, tricks, pitfalls, and resources for teacher surrender and step-by-step documentation of the entire process of customizing this student-driven dream into a reality to support the learning process in the middle school math classroom will be included. Roles were reversed. No more battle royale. Students became the experts in their learning, while the teacher surrendered to their creativity. It was a win-win situation!
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bit.ly/fortnitevsmath
