Tag Archives: Standards for Mathematical Practice

Early Childhood Math Routines

Mathematics is a wonderful game. It's one that can stretch students' minds and expose them to the beauty and unexpected delights that lie behind every good problem. I've always gravitated to colleagues who share my love of math's playful, game-like side, so I quickly made friends with Toni Cameron when we met at P.S. 503 in … Continue Reading ››

Multiplication Is Not Repeated Addition

On the NCTM discussion site myNCTM, there's currently an extended discussion about "Division and multiplication of fractions." As the discussion has continued, I've grown concerned with what I see as a fundamental problem with the way we often introduce multiplication as repeated addition: "Multiplying 4 by 5 means we're combining five groups of four items. … Continue Reading ››

International Congress for Mathematics Education Part 2

I began this post on Friday night in Hamburg Germany, near the end of ICME, the quadrennial international math-education conference that's been both exhilarating and exhausting. I’m now finishing it on the airplane headed back home. ICME-paper As interesting as many of the presentations have been, they've also been … Continue Reading ››

International Congress for Mathematics Education Part 1

I'm currently attending the 13th International Congress on Mathematics Education (ICME) in Hamburg, Germany, with well over 1000 math educators from around the world. Professor Gabriele Kaiser opened the conference with a statement of solidarity with Turkish mathematics teachers and researchers who at the last minute were unable to attend due to newly imposed government … Continue Reading ››

A Mathematical Mystery Story with Web Sketchpad

Several years ago, I wrote a blog post about the value that students derive from writing mathematics with Sketchpad. The post included an example of a simple Logo iteration, easily implemented in Sketchpad, that produces some very complex and interesting shapes depending on the values of several input parameters. In the … Continue Reading ››

A Coordinate Plane Logic Puzzle

For the past few years, Scott Steketee and I have collaborated with the author team of Everyday Mathematics to integrate Web Sketchpad deeply into their curriculum. As part of that work, I just completed a websketch that nicely mixes practice with logical reasoning. Students are challenged to find a hidden treasure on … Continue Reading ››

Putting the Power of a Point Theorem to Work

The power of a point theorem is one of the more surprising results in elementary geometry. The theorem says that if two chords AB and CD of a circle intersect at point P, then the product AP · PB is equal to the product CP · PD. You can see an illustration of this theorem in the Web Sketchpad model below. Drag … Continue Reading ››

Dilation Games: Assessment That’s Fun

March 2023 UPDATE: If the dilation games below whet your appetite for challenges based on transformations, check out these Reflection and Rotation games as well. What does dilation feel like? I recently had the opportunity to work with a group of students who were testing activities that treat geometric transformations as functions (what … Continue Reading ››

Constructing Equal-Area Triangles

The origins of this week's Web Sketchpad model date back to the  Connected Geometry curriculum from the mid 1990s. I was one of the co-authors of the curriculum, working at Education Development Center with a  wonderful team of math educators (Al Cuoco, … Continue Reading ››

Pi Day 2015: Pieces of Pi

For this year’s Pi Day post, I thought I’d continue our Web Sketchpad (WSP) construction theme. But rather than adapting the visualizations from last year’s Pi Day post to the new construction capabilities, I decided to take a different approach. Some time ago, I built a set of custom tools … Continue Reading ››