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NCTM’s Virtual 2021 Annual Meeting ran from April 21 through May 1, and in Session 299 Daniel Scher, Karen Hollebrands, and I presented an on-demand video workshop to introduce Web Sketchpad (WSP). Even if you weren’t able to attend the conference, you can still take advantage of this workshop, and we will be glad to...
This post is a follow-up to Sarah Stephens’ guest post of a week ago, in which she described a lesson using embodied cognition to help students make sense of the interior angle sum theorem for triangles, not just as an abstract concept, but as a property grounded in their concrete physical experiences. The day before...
[This guest post by Sarah Stephens, a senior at Pennsylvania State University, describes a lesson she created as part of her Senior Honors Thesis on leveraging embodied cognition to help students develop abstract mathematical concepts.] As a soon-to-be classroom mathematics teacher, I have taken special interest in the field of embodied cognition and integrating it...
With a few adjustments, we can make the Hundred Chart more intuitive and more useful for students. This post explains why the improvements are needed and describes how students can build a physical model that more accurately corresponds to the number system.
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....
A recent post on an NCTM discussion group asked about tools to help students visualize and understand addition and subtraction of integers. We wanted to make a visualization tool for students that they could use in multiple ways. The result is the Web Sketchpad model below (and here). Page one focuses on addition while page...
I was delighted that Daniel recently posted our Binomial Multiplication sketches in Web Sketchpad format. I thought about those sketches when I noticed a fairly new myNCTM thread on “When and How do we phase out the body in math education?”
At the 2017 NCTM Annual Meeting I was invited to do a short Wednesday-afternoon presentation on Function Dances in the NCTM Networking Lounge. (Here’s the handout from the presentation.) The idea of function dances is to get students (or in this case teachers) moving around, acting as the independent and dependent variables in geometric transformations....
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. As interesting as many of the presentations have been, they’ve also been almost entirely lecture format with Q&A at...
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...