The Math Education Blog
π Day has always been a special day for me, from my earliest days. In fact, I’ve never figured out whether I was so eager to celebrate my first π Day that I jumped the gun and sent my mom into labor early, or whether I just wanted be sure to experience all 24 hours...
Yesterday, I led a webinar that demonstrated how Sketchpad and Web Sketchpad can be a powerful tools for exploring Common Core algebra topics. My examples included solving for unknowns with a pan balance, exploring the slopes of lines, maximizing the area of a fixed-perimeter rectangle, and graphing trigonometric functions. I touched only briefly on each example during the...
A few days ago I led a webinar on the Common Core and Sketchpad for Sketchpad beginners, and I showed four Sketchpad activities aligned with both the Content Standards and the Standards for Mathematical Practice. I mixed it up a bit by showing two activities in which students manipulate prepared sketches, and two activities in...
It started with an unassuming bunny that hopped along a number line. In 2011, our team at KCP Technologies released Sketchpad Explorer for the iPad, making it possible for teachers and students to interact with desktop Sketchpad models on their iPads. We were thrilled to bring the iPad’s multitouch technology to Sketchpad, but sensed that there...
I’m excited to be making my first presentation of the 2013-14 school year next week in Baltimore. Daniel Scher and I are presenting Picturing Functions and Functions of Pictures. We’ll be discussing the connections between pictures and functions. These connections are even richer than I realized when I first began to work with pictures in Sketchpad. In the...
[Today’s post is from Steven Fuchs, with whom I recently corresponded and whose enthusiasm was sufficiently infectious that I pressed him to share it here. –Scott] One day late last spring, while teaching at St. Thomas High School in Houston, I noticed in a book a figure demonstrating Monge’s Theorem. (Don’t look this up yet;...
Harry congratulates a rower after sweeping Yale for his last time. Harry Parker died this summer, two weeks after coaching the Harvard rowing team to yet another sweep of all four races (varsity, JV, freshmen, and spares) against Yale and two days after accompanying his 1980 Olympic crew on a reunion row. I had the...
Four years ago, my colleague Scott Steketee and I began brainstorming new Sketchpad activities for a National Science Foundation grant called Dynamic Number. Our goal was to use Sketchpad to make ideas from number, operation, early algebra, and algebra come alive through interactive models that emphasized conceptual understanding. Scott and I had lots of help....
Today I leave for my first proper vacation in a year and a half. Last time I took such a vacation, Key sold its high school textbooks to Kendall Hunt and transformed from a publishing company to a educational technology company. This time I just hope to survive the end of the world. 🙂 Before...
We were so impressed by Jamila Riser’s talk at NCSM a couple of years ago that we asked her to present an Ignite! for us this year. Now, we’ve asked her to guest blog so we can share even more about the amazing work she’s doing in Delaware. Jamila is the Director of the Delaware...