One of the more popular TV channels in India, especially during the exams, is Topper ( http://www.yupptv.com/topper_tv_live.html http://www.yupptv.com/topper_tv

One of the more popular TV channels in India, especially during the exams, is Topper ( http://www.yupptv.com/topper_tv_live.html http://www.yupptv.com/topper_tv_live.html ) The channel has its share of teaching, but mostly its crude gameification. Very effective channel. In terms of viewership during the exam season( totally unfair given India's huge student population ), it would easily surpass your CNN or Fox or whatever it is that Americans watch. I watch a fair deal of Topper ( very addictive channel ). So they "teach" determinants by rapidly flashing square matrices on the screen and the competing student groups have to guess the value of the determinant. Not by computing adjoints and cofactors - that would be painfully slow. Mostly you use properties of determinants (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinant#Properties_of_the_determinant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinant#Properties_of_the_d... ). So if its a 3 by 3 and say a column is 3,1,4 and another column is 9,3,12, you know the value is zero ( because you could factor out the scalar multiple 3 and then two columns become identical, ergo value zero ). Sometimes they'll flash a triangular matrix and all you have to do is multiply along the diagonals. Or you'd have row 1 = [4,1,2], row 2 = [5,3,5], row 3 = [1,2,3]. Some smartypants would correctly guess that row 2 was just the sum of the other two rows, so the determinant must be zero. Is this sort of thing "useful" ? I don't know. But this is how I learnt much of my math in India...and they continue to use these games to this day. I can look at equations of lines & tell you if they slope up or down. I can tell you whether your parabola is convex or concave, where the focii are and what the lengths of the minor and major axis of your ellipse will be....tons and tons of repititive trivia, force-fed through pattern matching & gamification. Just by looking, no actual calculations! But this is one of the reasons Indian grad students tend to do well out here in STEM...we have no intuition but tons of gameified training. Once we are here, we'll get the intuition as well. To start with intuition would be a horrible idea, because the teacher quality back home is horible. Most of them honestly have no idea what a vector is or a complex number is...in most cases English is not our native tongue, so we can't even pronounce "surd" correctly, let alone know where it came from, but we all know that the root of 3 is a surd and its root isn't a surd and so on ( my math text: http://books.google.com/books?id=1C4iQNUWLBwC&lpg=PA25&pg=PA26#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=1C4iQNUWLBwC&lpg=PA25&#... ) imho, gamefication is unequivocally good in STEM, atleast upto college math level. Ultimately its all symbol pushing.