After our in-class brainstorming session and countless hours talking to myself trying to come up with ideas suitable for high school students to practice their arithmetic, I narrowed it down to two pretty good ones (I think at least).
The first is a game - it could be computer based or ipod/ipad/mobile device oriented. Since many high school students listen to a lot of dub step/trance/techno, I would create a dub step math game. In this game students could create their own song or replicate mashups where each note or sound is represented by a number and they would have to find some way to add/subtract/multiply/divide to get that number where each time the arithmetic problems are different.
If the student was replicating the song, the software would give them equations to solve whereas if they were creating their own, they would have to create the equations and then have a classmate solve them in order to listen to their mashup.
The second idea I had was to replace CAPTCHA phrases required with simple arithmetic problems. You could program the browsers so that each time the students wish to change websites, they had to solve an arithmetic problem. I think it would annoy the students enough that they might actually memorize their times tables to be able to surf the web faster. Also, there could be some way to integrate this into the wifi system that the students are allowed to connect to similar to the way they are able to prohibit access to certain websites. Worse case scenario some tech-y student develops a program to override the new arithmetic CAPTCHAs, in which case - more power to you!
Both of these ideas sound fun. Is there any way to help students develop conceptual understandings (instead of just the facts)? The PhET group has some math sims that might be helpful to look at (http://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulations/category/math).
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