The Math Education Blog
We’ve all seen amazing examples of illusions, but did you know that there is a fertile community of researchers creating new ones? The Best Illusion of the Year contest and website provide a showcase for celebrating illusions. This year’s winner for best illusion was created by Christopher D. Blair, Gideon P. Caplovitz, and Ryan E.B. Mruczek from the University of Nevada,...
From 2009 to 2013, I had the pleasure of working with the elementary teachers at the School for Discovery and Exploration in Brooklyn, New York as they field tested Sketchpad materials for the Dynamic Number project. Although the project has ended, I still keep in touch with a few of the teachers, and they continue to...
Nathan Dummitt teaches mathematics and statistics at Columbia Preparatory School in New York, NY. He teaches all four years and is interested in sharing low-threshold, high-ceiling activities with his students. — Guest post by Nathan Dummitt I teach Geometry at a high school in New York City, and I like to start the school year...
According to Wikipedia, the Brouwer Fixed Point Theorem, named after mathematician and philosopher Luitzen Brouwer, states that “for any continuous function f mapping a compact convex set into itself, there is a point x0 such that f(x0) = x0. This is a deep theorem, but one aspect of it is lovely, surprising, and entirely approachable by high-school...
In the early 1990s, Danny Vizcaino, a high school student at Monte Vista High School in California, wrote to Key Curriculum Press noting that Sketchpad did not come with a tool to draw an oval. Undaunted by this omission, Danny had built his own oval with the software and shared it with Key’s editors. As shown in the...
When I was child, I loved to solve the brainteasers in logic puzzle magazines. You probably know the type: Ruth, Phyllis, and Joan each bought a different kind of fruit (orange, apple, pear) and a different vegetable (spinach, kale, carrots) at the supermarket. No one bought both an orange and carrots. Ruth didn’t buy an apple or...
There are certain topics in mathematics education not appropriate for polite discussion. Number bases other than 10 fit this category well, perhaps because of their association with the maligned “new math” of the 1960s. That’s a shame because there is a lot to learn from them, especially when presented as interactive puzzles. Below (and here) are...
For a while now, I’ve been intrigued by the ways in which the study of geometric transformations can provide students with a very effective introduction to function concepts. Daniel and I have written a couple of articles about this topic, and we created a number of activities to take advantage of what can arguably be...
With the World Cup in our hemisphere, and the US squad having started out with a win over Ghana, my thoughts turned to the mathematics of soccer. My friend Henri Picciotto has a nice page about the shooting angle, the angle within which a shot is on goal, so I thought of using Sketchpad to...
Guest blogger Juan Camilo Acevedo is part of the University of Chicago’s Center for Elementary Mathematics and Science Education (CEMSE) digital team, where he develops Sketchpad-based activities for Everyday Mathematics. Currently, he teaches undergraduate language classes at the University of Chicago and is writing his doctoral dissertation on Digital Humanities. Juan holds a BA in...