The Math Education Blog
With Web Sketchpad, it’s easy to craft tools that are tailor made for the task at hand. I was reminded of this flexibility several weeks ago when creating an interactive model for the elementary curriculum Everyday Mathematics. My goal was to design a lesson focusing on the triangle area formula, A = bh/2. In particular,...
In my prior posts ( When Factoring Gets Personal, Open the Safe, and Reasoning with Multiples to Find the Mystery Number), I’ve given examples of how learning about multiples and factors can be made more engaging through the use of puzzles. Now, to add to this collection, is the lock puzzle below (and here). The first page of...
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, Paul Goldenberg, and June Mark, among others) to develop a habits of mind approach...
This Thursday, Scott Steketee and I will be presenting two sessions at the NCTM 2015 Annual Meting in Boston: Functions as Dances: Experience Variation and Relative Rate of Change Session 52 on Thursday, April 16, 2015: 8:00 AM-9:15 AM in 157 B/C (BCEC) How better to explore rate of change than as independent and dependent...
Simultaneous equations belong in elementary-school mathematics curricula. That’s been my mantra for many years, and I want to examine it now in the context of an interactive Web Sketchpad activity. When I say that elementary-age students should encounter simultaneous equations, I don’t mean that they should be instructed in the standard algebraic procedure for solving pairs of...
Today’s blog post features a sketch from Anna Nguyen, who’s a 9th grade student. Anna observes, “Math is one of my favorite subjects. I’m not a genius or the smartest in my class, but I do enjoy dealing with letters and numbers, which is also why I like chemistry. I think GSP is the most...
By Adrienne Barrett This post is by guest blogger Adrienne Barrett, who’s a senior mathematics and education dual major at Rowan University. She is currently student teaching and upon graduation in May, she hopes to find a full-time position teaching high-school mathematics. She’s always loved math, and studying it in college has given her a...
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 for the non-Web version of...
Dan Meyer has posted a number of “What Can You Do With This?” activities on his blog. (Activities is probably too prescriptive a word; they’re more in the nature of prompts for student thinking, noticing, and wondering.) One of the first was the image below, which he made by superimposing frames from a video camera....
In my prior blog posts, I’ve described how to construct ellipses using linkages, concentric circles, congruent triangles, and tangent circles. These are all great methods, but I think I got ahead of myself: There’s a simple ellipse construction technique described in nearly every precalculus book that I’ve bypassed in my excitement to show you the more exotic approaches. Say hello to...