The Math Education Blog
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....
For the past year, my blogging partner Scott and I have worked with the team of Everyday Mathematics to build interactive Web Sketchpad models for their forthcoming new edition. It’s been fun for both of us to find ways to insert dynamic mathematics into their K–6 curriculum. Last year, I shared an Everyday Mathematics isosceles triangle investigation that...
Today there is no lack of outrage directed at the high-stakes standardized testing that has become so prevalent in the U.S. educational system. A recent opinion piece in The New York Times examines the backlash against the Common Core and lays the blame not on the standards themselves, but rather on the rise in testing that has accompanied their...
Michael de Villiers teaches courses in mathematics and mathematics education at University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. His website features a wealth of Dynamic Geometry-related books, articles, and sketches. He is the author of the Sketchpad activity module Rethinking Proof with The Geometer’s Sketchpad. This blog post is a condensed version of a longer article, “Conjecturing, Refuting and Proving...
On November 6 I had the honor of being one of the panelists in a Symposium Honoring Zalman Usiskin, held to honor Zal’s many years of contributions to mathematics education, from his groundbreaking 1971 textbook Geometry: A Transformation Approach (GATA) to his continuing activities today. My panel was supposed to discuss his work on the...
When it comes to simultaneous equations, I like to push the bounds of conventional pedagogical wisdom. In an earlier post, I offered a puzzle in which elementary-age students solve for four unknowns given eight equations. Now, I’d like to present a puzzle that might sound even more audacious: Solving for ten unknowns. Oh, and did I mention that the unknowns are...
Dan Anderson commented on my Pentaflake post to observe that the pentaflake can also be created by a random process, sometimes called the Chaos Game. In this game you start with an arbitrary point and dilate it toward a target point that’s randomly chosen from some set of points that you’ve established. You then dilate...