Back due to encouragment from Feedspot

I got email from Feedspot this morning indicating that 30 people are interested in this blog, through their service. I was offered a premium membership for attracting attention to the service. I'm not sure if it's a scam or not, but I don't see any harm in it, yet. I've got lots of other things to think about besides being scammed by somebody who designed a blog reader.

I was hoping to get people to talk to about this project, because I know where my own limitations lie (I am good a problem solving and idea generation, but have limited attention to detail, which gets in the way of my finishing projects consistently). So, if there is anyone reading this out there who would be interested in talking with me about it, feel free to email me or post in the comments, although I'm not in the habit of checking comments here, yet.

I am very interested in the potential of breaking the fourth wall, as a method for engaging girls with the content I hope to make available to them. Defined - "The fourth wall" is an expression stemming from the world of theater. In most modern theater design, a room will consist of three physical walls, as well as a an imaginary fourth that serves to separate the world of the characters from that of the audience.In fiction, "breaking the fourth wall" often means having a character become aware of their fictional nature. This can range from your character advising you to "Press X" in a tutorial all the way to Psycho Mantis reading your memory card and mentioning the other games you've been playing. However, the most direct violation of the fourth wall would be a character openly acknowledging they are in a video game or even directly speaking to you, the player, instead of to your character.
(from Urban Dictionary, http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Breaking%20the%20Fourth%20Wall). In particular, I want girls who engage with this project to learn to break the fourth wall regularly, while in the game, to learn to use the internet to solve their problems, the way engineers do in real life.

My Initial Notes About This Project

I had a long dream this morning about that novel for girls I'd been working on and wanting to aim at teaching math. I dreamed that the book should be a website that is game-based with math as the positive reinforcement, which led me to think I need to get a math book that is used in middle school. No idea what they learn at that point in time, these days. I also imagined an arc of the story going from Areya's homeland to Mastery (I should have written something about this sooner, damn), with side quests to reinforce math skills with problems to solve as positive reinforcement. Also, using the interwebs as a built in means for getting help/answers to problems, as a method for encouraging this approach to problem-solving, like programmers do. So, I imagined basically, a straight line from her home to the big city of Mastery (referring to mastery of mathematics) with cross-pieces that are side quests that reinforce skills by solving math problems and requiring use of the interwebs to find the answer to how to do math problems. This is pretty lame, compared to whatever it was I thought this morning. :-( The title Areya Comes to the Great City of Mastery or something like that was something clever I'd literally dreamed up. I was motivated by reviewing Elizabeth's website yesterday, which had some nice stuff that she's worked on. She gets a card from one of the visitors with a number on it, which will be used to solve some problems later on in the game (e.g. is it a prime number, is it odd, what properties do numbers actually have, what are they good for, what can't they do, and so on, and it will be the answer to some puzzle or other when I get further into the game design).
Extra points for exploring side quests and doing extra problems
Extra points for adding story to the game, if there's a place for it (what do you imagine happened so that the golden sarcophagus ended up here under the mountain?)
Physical support materials – card with number on it (or many), paperback math book that is the basis for the problems, set up call back from Areya on cell phone, per Cathy's Book, mail card(s) to people who sign up for them for an extra fee?
Reinforcement of why math is important to know (money, success, choices due to success/money, and it can be fun, engineers build the world)
In-game options to choose the right answer to push the game forward (yes/no buttons in dungeons that open new areas)
In-game benefits of learning to use a calculator thoroughly
Problem solving using boolean algebra (the kind with venn diagrams), which may be a basic skill in learning to program later on
Link to Stanford remedial math class for access to additional content (cool pictures of kitties with great ear tufts reinforcement → https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-a&hs=yUt&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&tbm=isch&q=caracal&revid=1236013464&biw=1366&bih=636&dpr=1 )
https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSTMml7uJc2Ca2rDA_jkc3d6zIul2fS_HclolSJkij0x7SvwNxw
Map of the city of Mastery, based on a city map, but containing quadrants based on the level of math the girl is learning with links to relevant content and quests related to subject matter
Bought middle school math book
http://www.sdsc.edu/~woodka/Chapter1.html
http://www.sdsc.edu/~woodka/Chapter2.html
http://www.sdsc.edu/~woodka/Chapter3.html
http://www.sdsc.edu/~woodka/Chapter4.html
http://www.sdsc.edu/~woodka/Chapter5.html
http://www.sdsc.edu/~woodka/Chapter6.html

9/30/13
Received Danica McKellar's book, Math Doesn't Suck: How to Survive Middle School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail today. She, the author, has a theorem named after her! Who knew a tv bimbo could also be a physics whiz!

Day One on the Journey to the City of Mastery

I have been working, weakly - not weekly, I'm afraid - on a short novel for girls, provisionally called something like "Areya's Journey to the City of Mastery", that I wish could also teach math. Recently, I also signed up for a short course in HTML/CSS, and see that it might be much more useful for me to design a website that takes girls - or anyone else who might be interested, for that matter - through some of the math that tween girls are exposed to, during the time when they begin to absorb the messages they receive from society at large that tells them they should hate math, or that girls aren't good at math, or boys don't like girls who are good at math. And today I received the math book I bought to support this idea of creating a website based on a story that requires math facility to progress from one section of the story to the next. The book is Math Doesn't Suck: How to Survive Middle School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail by Danica MeKellar. She is a TV actress and has had parts on "The West Wing" and "The Wonder Years", and she is a gifted mathematician, as it turns out. According to the dust jacket of the book,

"... her work in mathematics, most notably for her role as coauthor of a groundbreaking mathematical physics theorem, which bears her name (The Chayes-McKellar-Winn Theorem)."

So, my point in setting up this new blog is to ramble on a bit about my progress in designing this online book/resource/story to teach some math to tween girls, and to also babble a bit about my adventures in going through Dr. McKellar's book, relearning what I'll need to know, in order to put appropriate math content into my website. Oh,and the other reason this project interests me is that I remember vividly being one of those girls who was good at math, but sucked up the social messages about how girls can't do math between sixth and seventh grade. In sixth grade I was the best in my class at whatever math we were doing, and by 7th grade I was having trouble with a basic algebra class. The rest, as they say, is history, I'm sorry to say. ;-)

Dr. McKellar's book's Table of Contents