The Math Education Blog
Tomoko Fuse is a Japanese origami artist whose designs are highly geometric. A Google search for her origami models reveals a plethora of boxes and intricate three-dimensional structures, many of which are folded from multiple sheets of paper and then assembled together. As an avid origami folder, I’ve always admired Fuse’s work. But nothing prepared...
In a recent blog post, Karen Greenhaus describes how it’s possible to construct familiar corporate logos using Sketchpad. You might start with a rhombus, for example, and then reflect it twice to obtain the Mitsubishi logo. Karen’s post got me thinking about other creative uses of transformations with Sketchpad. In particular, Sketchpad 5 allows you to...
As a student, I didn’t place conic sections on my list of favorite high school topics. The standard textbook treatment of the ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola seemed uninspired. There were messy algebraic equations with multiple square roots. There was lots of terminology. Drawing a conic meant plotting several points on graph paper and connecting them with...
As an author of Sketchpad activities, I like to think that I can pose good problems for students to solve. But as I visit elementary classrooms and watch students use Sketchpad, I realize that a large part of the enjoyment they derive from using our software comes from creating their own problems and sharing them...
A quick quiz: How many fractions are there? This may sound like an absurd question, but in the context of elementary mathematics curricula, it makes a lot of sense. Think about it: Children encounter fractions like 1/2, 3/4, and 2/6 all the time, but do they ever see 1/100, 31/90, or 499/500? Unlikely. No brave...